Nvidia is reportedly buying Hugging Face, the open-source library millions of AI developers use, for $12.9 billion.
The Information reports the chipmaker has agreed to acquire Hugging Face, following an earlier Business Insider report that pegged a sale near $13 billion. Hugging Face started as a teen chatbot app in 2016 before becoming the default hub for open-source machine learning; it claims 13 million users, more than 500,000 public datasets, and over 3 million hosted models. Nvidia has tried this before, joining Hugging Face's 2023 funding round at a $4.5 billion valuation, then making a $500 million buyout offer late last year that Hugging Face turned down. Cofounder Thomas Wolf declined to confirm this week's reported deal, telling Bloomberg only that the company has "always had a lot of interest."
Buying Hugging Face would give Nvidia influence over how AI developers find and distribute models, not just the chips that run them. That combination, hardware plus the software commons built on top of it, is the part users online are calling a monopoly risk, while others note that rival repositories like ModelScope offer an exit if Nvidia starts steering the platform.
Nvidia's own earnings this week showed the AI boom still driving its business upward, so $12.9 billion looks less like a gamble and more like spare change it can spend now before Hugging Face has any more leverage to negotiate with.