Nvidia buys Hugging Face, the main "library" of open SI models, for $12.9 billion
Prepared by Sintelligent with the help of SI. Publication time restored from the build log. . Updated: .
A chipmaker now owns the main "marketplace" of open models too, from hardware to the place where models are published and downloaded. Open SI gets a powerful sponsor with limitless compute, and the promise to keep the platform open becomes something the community now has reason to watch closely.
Nvidia confirmed a $12.93 billion all-cash deal. On Hugging Face, 18 million developers share 3 million models, 500 thousand datasets and 1 million apps; Nvidia itself is the largest author of open models on the platform (more than 500). Jensen Huang promised that Hugging Face will remain open to any models, clouds and chips. Hugging Face chief executive Clément Delangue said the company needs more compute and support and that he himself went to Huang a few weeks before the deal. A year earlier, according to press reports, Hugging Face turned down a $500 million offer from Nvidia; the company's annual revenue is about $150 million.