Nvidia Corp. has agreed to acquire Hugging Face Inc. for $12.93 billion, marking one of the largest acquisitions in the company's history. CEO Jensen Huang stated that the platform will maintain its brand, leadership, and neutrality, ensuring it remains an open platform for the AI ecosystem without requiring Nvidia compute for deployment.
Hugging Face currently serves as a primary hub for open AI, hosting over 3 million models, 500,000 datasets, and 1 million applications. The platform is used by more than 18 million developers and researchers and over 200,000 companies. Nvidia's investment will target reliability, safety, model evaluation, inference, and deployment to reduce friction for enterprise adoption.
The acquisition comes as Hugging Face's growth outpaced its financial resources. The company was valued at $4.5 billion in its last disclosed round in 2023 and had an estimated annualized revenue of roughly $150 million this year. The deal aims to grow the user base from 18 million to 100 million builders in the next few years.
Nvidia is already a significant contributor to the platform, having published more than 500 models and 250 open datasets. The company's strategy is to foster a diverse ecosystem of specialized models to increase aggregate compute demand and hedge against competitors like Meta Platforms, OpenAI, and Microsoft building their own accelerators.
