Nvidia agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, expanding the chipmaker’s reach into the software tools 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 the service to share over three million models, 500,000 datasets and one million applications, according to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in a Thursday announcement.
Huang said Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem, with developers free to choose their models, frameworks, cloud providers and computing platforms, and that Nvidia hardware will not be required to build or deploy through the service. Nvidia already publishes more than 500 models and 250 open datasets on Hugging Face, and 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.
