Nvidia is acquiring Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, marking the company's largest acquisition to date. This deal surpasses the $6.9 billion purchase of Mellanox in 2020. The transaction consists of $11.9 billion for shareholders and up to $1 billion in equity-based retention incentives for employees.
Hugging Face serves as a critical AI distribution hub, hosting over 3 million AI models, approximately 500,000 datasets, and more than 1 million applications. The platform is utilized by a community of over 18 million people and 200,000 companies.
CEO Jensen Huang stated that Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the AI ecosystem. Developers will continue to have the freedom to choose their models, frameworks, clouds, and inference service providers, and Nvidia compute will not be required for deployment through the platform.
The acquisition follows a significant growth trajectory for Hugging Face, which was founded in 2016 by Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf. In August 2023, the company had raised $235 million at a valuation of $4.5 billion, with investments from Salesforce Ventures, Google, Amazon, IBM, Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, and Sound Ventures.
