Nvidia to acquire Hugging Face for $12.9 billion
Nvidia will purchase the open-source AI platform Hugging Face for about $12.9 bn, paying roughly $11.9 bn to investors and offering up to $1 bn in stock incentives, while pledging to keep the service open-source.
Nvidia announced a $12.9 billion acquisition of the artificial-intelligence platform Hugging Face. The deal includes an $11.9 billion cash payment to Hugging Face investors and may provide up to $1 billion in stock-based retention incentives. The company, founded in 2016 in New York City, counts Amazon, AMD and Intel among its investors.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in a blog post that Hugging Face will remain open-source and developers will not be required to use Nvidia technology. He added that Nvidia’s infrastructure and global reach could improve the platform’s reliability, safety, model evaluation, inference and deployment capabilities while preserving the open ecosystem.
Hugging Face co-founder Clément Delangue told CNBC that the company approached Nvidia for additional resources, scale and visibility, describing Nvidia as a suitable partner for the next phase of the platform.
"Nvidia's infrastructure, engineering and global reach can help improve platform reliability, safety, model evaluation, inference and deployment capabilities, while preserving the open ecosystem that made Hugging Face foundational," Huang wrote.
The acquisition is expected to expand Nvidia’s AI portfolio and support the growth of Hugging Face’s developer community worldwide.