Nvidia buys Hugging Face for $12.9B in push into AI software
Nvidia will acquire Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, extending its AI reach from chips into the software layer used to build and deploy models. Hugging Face runs an open-source platform for sharing models, datasets, and development tools, used by more than 18 million developers, researchers, and creators. The platform hosts over 3 million models, 500,000 datasets, and 1 million applications. Nvidia says Hugging Face will stay open to the wider AI ecosystem, with users still free to choose their models, frameworks, cloud providers, and compute platforms. Nvidia hardware will not be required. Nvidia already shares more than 500 models and 250 open datasets on the platform. The deal follows a recent security breach at Hugging Face involving an autonomous AI agent that accessed internal datasets and credentials, though no tampering with public assets was found.
