Nvidia has agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, bringing one of the most popular hosting platforms for open-source AI models, datasets, and tools under the ownership of the world’s biggest AI chipmaker.
Hugging Face is an online platform founded in 2016 that gives AI developers a space to share their projects and data with other users and the general public. It’s often described as the “GitHub” for AI due to its browsable library of open-source machine learning models and emphasis on community collaboration features.
Speculation regarding a potential Hugging Face acquisition started on August 23rd, after Business Insider reported that the startup was working with a bank to explore options for a $13 billion sale. By August 27th, Business Insider reported that Nvidia had been having acquisition conversations with Hugging Face over the previous week, though an earlier report by The Information said that a $12.9 billion deal between the companies had already been agreed upon.
While these reports couldn’t be independently verified at the time, Nvidia has now publicly declared its intentions to purchase the open-source AI repository. With open-source developers currently racing to catch up with closed AI systems, Nvidia stands to gain a strategic foothold to help preserve its AI hardware dominance now that closed-source AI providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google are attempting to produce their own AI chips.
The last official valuation Hugging Face had was $4.5 billion, off the back of a funding round in 2023 that Nvidia participated in. The Financial Times previously reported that Hugging Face rejected a $500 million investment offer from Nvidia last year that would have valued it at $7 billion, apparently expressing concerns over having a single, dominant investor.
The startup isn’t a significant money-maker, however. The Information reports that Hugging Face has recently been generating around $150 million in annualized revenue, barely a fraction of its purchase price. That said, as the world’s most valuable public company, Nvidia sure has a lot of money to throw around right now, and it seems happy to do so to protect the AI empire it’s been building.
This story is developing…