As NVIDIA moves to acquire Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, CEO Clement Delangue says that “Open-source AI is at an inflexion point” and added that together with NVIDIA, they aim to ‘empower 100 million AI builders to own their intelligence.’ The blockbuster deal gives NVIDIA a deeper foothold in the global AI developer ecosystem, while Hugging Face says it will remain open, independent, and compute-agnostic.
Noting that he is ‘super happy’ that Hugging Face is joining NVIDIA, he posted on X, “10 years after starting Hugging Face, open-source AI is at an inflection point. Thanks to the community, we’ve shown that it can be a complement, and even an alternative, to closed-source APIs. But for it to happen at larger scale, it needs more compute, more support, more collaboration and more visibility. That’s why we went to talk to Jensen, who offered to do exactly that with us.”
“In addition to doubling down on NVIDIA’s massive contributions to open-source AI (I called them the “King of American open-source AI” earlier this year), they’ve committed to strongly supporting Hugging Face and our mission while keeping the platform open, independent and compute agnostic. The founders and the team are all staying to keep pushing this mission forward. Together, we think we can make open source the default way to build AI, with the goal of empowering 100 million AI builders to own their intelligence rather than rent it.”
Vibrant home for the open model developer: Jensen Huang on Hugging Face
NVIDIA on Thursday said it has acquired AI startup Hugging Face for USD 12.9 billion.
Speaking about it, NVIDIA chief Jensen Huang said in a blog post that NVIDIA has agreed to acquire Hugging Face for USD 12.93 billion, an acquisition through which it will scale Hugging Face's platform, strengthen its infrastructure and expand access to AI for developers and institutions worldwide.
Describing Hugging Face as a "vibrant home for the open model developer community," Huang said that more than 18 million developers, researchers and creators use Hugging Face to share more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets and 1 million applications.
More than 200,000 companies use the platform to discover, evaluate, customise and deploy AI.
"Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem. Developers will choose the models, frameworks, clouds, inference service providers, and computing platforms they want. NVIDIA compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face," Huang said.
Hugging Face will also continue to support open-source and open-weight models from across the ecosystem, from every model builder.
The New York-based Hugging Face was founded in 2016 by the French entrepreneurs Clement Delangue, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf.
