After weeks of rumors swirling, Nvidia today confirmed that it has acquired Hugging Face for $12.93 billion. Hugging Face’s platform hosts 3 million models, 1 million applications used by over 18 million developers, and 500,000 datasets.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in a blog post that Hugging Face will continue to support open source and open weight models and work to expand developer access.
“Hugging Face continues to be an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem. Developers choose the models they want, the frameworks they want, the cloud and inference service providers they want, and the compute platforms they want. Nvidia compute doesn’t have to be built on or deployed through Hugging Face,” said Huang.
Huang touted Nvidia’s contribution, saying the chip company has released more than 500 models and 250 open datasets in Hugging Face. He claimed that the company is building an open model to make it available to developers around the world.
For companies like Nvidia, the leading hardware platform for AI development and inference, having an open ecosystem that they control is beneficial because they can create a platform that is suitable for their chips. Additionally, as TechCrunch previously wrote, Nvidia will be able to package unused capacity with Hugging Face’s products and sell it to enterprise customers.
Founded in 2016, Hugging Face has raised more than $395 million in funding to date, according to Crunchbase. The company’s last round was in 2023, when it raised $235 million led by Salesforce Ventures with investments from Google, Amazon, IBM, and Nvidia.
In a post on X, Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue thanked the community for showing the company the potential to be an alternative to closed-source APIs.
“But to do that at scale, we need more compute, more support, more collaboration, and more visibility. That’s why we went to talk to Jensen, and he offered to do just that with us,” DeLang said.
Hug Face is attracting more and more attention, and more models are being released every day. Last year, the company rejected a $500 million deal from Nvidia, according to the Financial Times. Last month, The Information reported that Hugging Face’s annual revenue was $150 million.
In an interview with TechCrunch in July, Delangue said that growth rate is helping the platform “get closer to profitability.”
Nvidia’s Huang is a strong supporter of the open model. He co-authored a letter with several other organizations advocating for a weight-neutral model to strengthen the United States’ position against rivals such as China in the field of AI.
The company has invested heavily in model development. Last month, the Wall Street Journal reported that it had signed a $6 billion deal with coding startup Poolside to develop open models. The company said in its recent earnings call that it had injected more than $50 billion into AI Frontier Labs.
Huang proposed an open model when responding to one of his analysts, and said that nearly all open models run on Nvidia hardware. He also suggested the importance of these models in cybersecurity.
“One area where the frontier model is essential is cybersecurity. There are a number of cybersecurity companies that are using the frontier model to enable the defense of autonomous cybersecurity systems that run at scale and that run continuously. Those companies are emerging. There are some great companies. We couldn’t do it without an open model. So open… “Both models have been incredibly successful and have finally reached the frontier, but they’re also essential to the American economy. They’re also essential to the global economy,” he said.
DeLang said in July that Nvidia’s open model helped defend against Hugging Face’s cyber attack after the proprietary model failed to protect the platform. A few days earlier, OpenAI admitted that its unreleased model violated Hugging Face.
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