Nvidia is acquiring Hugging Face for US$12.93 billion, as it intends to “scale the latter’s platform, strengthen its infrastructure and expand access to AI for developers and institutions worldwide,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced in a blog post.
More than 18 million developers, researchers and creators use Hugging Face to share more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets and 1 million applications. More than 200,000 companies use the platform to discover, evaluate, customize and deploy AI.
Huang vowed that Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem, and that developers will be able to choose the models they want, the frameworks they want, the clouds and inference service providers they want and the computing platforms they want.
Nvidia compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face, he said.
“Hugging Face will continue to support open source and open weight models from across the ecosystem, from every model builder. It will continue to support multi-cloud and multi-accelerator development and deployment, so builders can use the hardware and infrastructure that best fit their work,” Huang assured.
“As the opportunity for open models accelerates, Hugging Face can serve the global AI community at unprecedented scale. 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,” he added.
