That Hugging Face was in sale it’s news from a few days ago, but now it seems to be emerging too buyer’s name: NVIDIA. The company led by Jensen Huang would have reached an agreement to acquire, shelling out approximately 12.9 billion dollarsthe platform dedicated to sharing and developing open source artificial intelligence models.
The information was reported by The Information, citing a person familiar with the negotiation. However, other sources describe a less defined situation: according to Business Insider, the negotiations have not yet produced a signed agreement and could therefore still be interrupted.
Neither NVIDIA nor Hugging Face responded to requests for comment reported by the publications that followed the story. CNBC also clarified that it had not been able to independently verify the indiscretion. The value attributed to the operation, if confirmed, would still be sufficient to transform it into one of the most significant acquisitions ever made by NVIDIA in the artificial intelligence sector.
Founded in 2016, Hugging Face maintains one of the most widely used repositories for AI models, datasets and tools. The platform is used by developers to publish, download, test and share models, providing an infrastructure that sits before the final applications. The acquisition It would therefore allow NVIDIA to significantly strengthen its presence in the software and modeling ecosystemgoing beyond the traditional role of accelerator provider.
The industrial logic of the operation is also linked to the strategy with which NVIDIA is trying to consolidate its position along the entire AI supply chain.
The interest in open source also takes on strategic importance in a market in which the main developers of proprietary models are working on the creation of internal accelerators. OpenAI, Google, Amazon and Anthropic are in fact developing or using proprietary hardware solutions with the aim of reducing dependence on NVIDIA GPUs.
A broader open source ecosystem could, from NVIDIA’s point of view, facilitate diffusion of a greater number of models and applications, maintaining high demand for computing infrastructures based on its own GPUs. It is therefore not surprising that the company has already invested large sums in the development and financing of open source models.
The possible acquisition would also have a second implication for NVIDIA: the return to the cloud computing sector. The company had scaled its DGX Cloud business about a year ago, but Hugging Face already allows developers to run models using compute capacity purchased from cloud providers.
The integration of the two activities could therefore allow NVIDIA to re-enter the market without having to build a platform for developers from scratch.
There is also a possible connection to NVIDIA’s commitments to financially support tens of billions of dollars of cloud contracts for its customers. If some of the purchased capacity goes unused, Hugging Face’s control could provide a channel through which to resell that capacity to users of the platform.
