NVIDIA has agreed to acquire AI development platform Hugging Face for US$12.93 billion (~RM52.24 billion), in what marks one of the company’s biggest moves to expand its presence beyond AI hardware. Its CEO, Jensen Huang, said the acquisition will allow the two companies to scale Hugging Face’s platform and expand access to AI for developers and institutions worldwide.
The company added that the acquisition will provide Hugging Face with additional infrastructure, engineering resources and global reach, while its team will remain in place. NVIDIA will also retain the platform’s brand and continue developing it.
Hugging Face Will Remain Open
Despite the acquisition, Hugging Face will remain open to the AI ecosystem. Developers will continue to be able to choose their preferred models, frameworks, cloud providers, inference services and computing platforms, meaning NVIDIA hardware will not be a requirement for using the platform.
It should be noted that NVIDIA already has a significant presence on Hugging Face, with the company describing itself as the platform’s largest contributor of open models and data. According to the tech giant, it has released more than 500 models and over 250 open datasets on the platform, alongside libraries and other development tools.
A Bigger Push Into Open-Weight AI Models
The acquisition comes as NVIDIA continues to promote open-weight AI models. Huang recently co-authored an open letter arguing that open weights can broaden access to AI by allowing startups, businesses, universities and public institutions to build on existing models rather than training everything from scratch.
This push became particularly notable in July following a cyberattack involving Hugging Face. NVIDIA subsequently joined more than 30 companies in establishing the Open Secure AI Alliance, which aims to encourage the development of open AI technologies for cybersecurity while promoting safeguards around their use.
As part of the initiative, the tech giant is contributing open models, model weights, data and research into AI agent infrastructure. Meanwhile, Hugging Face is contributing a format for safely storing AI model weights.
(Source: NVIDIA press release)
