Nvidia is set to acquire popular developer platform Hugging Face for $12.93 billion in a big bet on open source AI models. This confirms a previous report by The Information.
According to Reuters, Nvidia is betting that support for open AI models will drive future demand, even as its biggest customers develop their own chips to reduce reliance on the company. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang wrote in a blog post on Thursday that with the deal, Hugging Face will “remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem.”
“Together, we will scale Hugging Face’s platform, strengthen its infrastructure and expand access to AI for developers and institutions worldwide,” Huang wrote.
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Julien Chaumond, the co-founder and CTO of Hugging Face, said that HF will remain an independently run, neutral platform. “AI is at an inflection point,” he wrote on X. “Open source AI can become less relevant in the coming years if the big closed labs run away with it, OR it can become the foundational fabric of the next phase of human civilization,” he added.
“Those are vastly different outcomes, and we need the critical mass to ensure we give our collective best shot to the second outcome. Given @JensenHuang’s stance on open source AI and how he stepped up to defend it when it was under threat earlier in the summer, NVIDIA was the only partner we truly considered.”
The deal will prop up Nvidia as an important player in the market for open models. The chipmaker has already played an active role in backing the open AI industry with its widely used Nemotron model.
The latest deal would give Nvidia direct access to a platform developers use to collaborate, test and share tools using various open AI models. It would also potentially provide the insights and data required to narrow the technology gap with top U.S. and Chinese labs.
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Demand for open-weight models has surged as businesses face increasingly steep bills for the technology, and Chinese companies like DeepSeek and Z.ai have emerged as major players.
Hugging Face recently faced a major hacking incident. CEO Clement Delangue blamed engineering mistakes for the attack and said his company used an Nvidia version of a Chinese open model to resolve it.
Huang said that the open source environment can give defenders an “asymmetric advantage” over attackers.
“When I say asymmetric capability, there are way more people who are protecting than there are people who are attacking,” he explained. “And so, the benefit of having the community come together with open models, so that they can collaborate all transparently with each other, gives the defenders an asymmetric advantage.”