Nvidia confirms $12.9bn deal for Hugging Face

After a week of speculation, Nvidia confirmed it is buying AI model platform Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, making its largest outright acquisition to date as it pledges to keep the platform open.

CEO Jensen Huang said Thursday that the chip company would acquire Hugging Face, which had raised $395 million, as part of its focus on open AI and open weight models, prompting its shares to rise by around 1%.

He said: “NVIDIA has said that open models, data and tools broaden access to AI, and it has contributed hundreds of open models and datasets… As the opportunity for open models accelerates, Hugging Face can serve the global AI community at unprecedented scale.”

Hugging Face CEO Clement Delangue and his two co-founders will remain at the company, which develops its own AI tools and operates a platform for downloading open AI models, he confirmed to CNBC, and plan to run it as an “independently neutral platform” within Nvidia.

Nvidia’s open AI interest