NVIDIA is in negotiations to acquire Hugging Face, the largest platform for open AI models, for $12,9 billion. According to a report, the deal also includes about $1 billion more to retain key employees.
If the agreement goes through, Hugging Face would remain a neutral unit within the chip supplier that dominates the market. This would combine the largest hub of open models with the leader in hardware.
Hugging Face CEO Clement Delangue plans to significantly expand the community: from the current 18 million developers to 100 million, and then to 200 million. The company's founders — Clement Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf — started in 2016 with a sarcastic chatbot.
Earlier, in January, Hugging Face rejected NVIDIA's offer to invest $500 million at a valuation of $7 billion. The company approached talks of a full acquisition after incidents involving AI agents.
NVIDIA founder Jensen Huang noted that open models already account for about half of the company's growth and could give defenders an asymmetric advantage. How would such an integration affect the balance of power in open AI?
The deal underscores NVIDIA's ambition to go deeper not only into chips but also into the broader AI ecosystem, where open solutions play a key role.
