Nvidia started its AI business with humble AI accelerators, then moved to AI servers, and later to rack-scale and data center-scale platforms. With its multi-faceted AI strategy in place, the company is now looking beyond hardware. On Thursday, Nvidia said it had agreed to acquire Hugging Face, one of the world's largest platforms for distributing and developing open AI models, for $12.93 billion. Hugging Face will retain its brand and remain open to models, frameworks, clouds, inference providers, and computing platforms.
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Nvidia positions the deal as an expansion of its commitment to open-weight AI models and as a way to popularize the use of artificial intelligence in general by enabling different types of developers to use appropriate open models for their products. The move is strategically important for Nvidia as it commands the lion's share of the AI hardware market and wants demand for its hardware to grow. Yet, Nvidia promises not to force participants of the platform into its hardware ecosystem.
Hugging Face currently serves more than 18 million developers, researchers, and creators, who have uploaded over 3 million models, 500,000 datasets, and 1 million applications, according to Nvidia. Furthermore, more than 200,000 companies use the service to find, assess, modify, and deploy AI models. Nvidia claims this business model will remain intact after the acquisition: Hugging Face will continue to host open-source and open-weight models from different developers and support multiple clouds and accelerator architectures.
Meanwhile, Nvidia says that its infrastructure, engineering resources, and global presence can improve Hugging Face's platform reliability, safety, model evaluation, inference, and deployment capabilities, which means that it will increase the portion of Hugging Face that relies not only on its hardware but also on its resources and global presence.
It is noteworthy that Nvidia itself already has a considerable footprint on Hugging Face. The company claims to have published more than 500 models and 250 open datasets, making it one of the platform's largest contributors. Nvidia also develops some of its models, software libraries, and tools openly so that third-party developers can modify and build upon them.
Interestingly, the deal appears to have originated with Hugging Face's founder. Nvidia's Jensen Huang says Clément Delangue approached him while evaluating the company's next stage and concluded that Nvidia could provide an appropriate home for Hugging Face, its community, and its open-model ambitions. As it turns out, Nvidia agreed to buy Hugging Face and keep developing it. The Hugging Face team will join the Nvidia organization and continue working on the project.
