Nvidia buys Hugging Face for $12.9B in push into AI software

Nvidia has agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, expanding the chipmaker’s reach into the software that developers use to build and deploy artificial intelligence.

Hugging Face operates an open-source AI platform for sharing models, datasets and development tools. More than 18 million developers, researchers and creators use it to share over 3 million models, 500,000 datasets and 1 million applications, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in an announcement on Thursday.

“Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem,” Huang said, adding that developers will remain free to choose their models, frameworks, cloud providers and computing platforms.

Nvidia hardware will not be required to build or deploy through Hugging Face, he added. Nvidia already publishes more than 500 models and 250 open datasets on Hugging Face. The company said Hugging Face will continue supporting models from other developers as well as multiple cloud and accelerator providers.

The acquisition comes about a month after Hugging Face disclosed a security breach involving an autonomous AI agent that gained unauthorized access to internal datasets and service credentials. The company said it found no evidence of tampering with public models, datasets or applications.

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