Nvidia signs a $13 billion deal to acquire Hugging Face
Nvidia has officially reached an agreement to acquire the open-source artificial intelligence platform for $12.9 billion, thereby continuing its expansion beyond hardware
Perhaps some people will only have heard of it in connection with the worrying prank played by ChatGPT on its developers: when OpenAI’s AI decided, a few weeks ago, to step outside the scope of development to attack a company, that company was Hugging Face. Today, the news is that Hugging Face itself has been acquired by the world’s most valuable chip manufacturer, namely Nvidia.
The Santa Clara-based giant has announced that the deal was finalised for a sum of around 13 billion dollars. This figure immediately makes the deal the second-largest in the company’s history, second only to the approximately $20 billion spent on acquiring a large stake in Groq. It also far exceeds the nearly $7 billion paid in 2019 to acquire the Israeli firm Mellanox.
The first figure that stands out strikingly from the data is Hugging Face’s annualised turnover, which stands at around $150 million, having risen from approximately $100 million in the space of two months. Nvidia is therefore paying eighty times the revenue for a company which, three years ago – in a funding round in which it participated – was valued at $4.5 billion.
So it’s worth taking a closer look at this former New York-based start-up, founded in 2016. Today, ten years on, it has become something of a hub where open-source models are uploaded, downloaded and fine-tuned: over two million models hosted and more than thirteen thousand companies using its services. A distribution infrastructure, with the community that has formed around it, which is growing rapidly thanks to the availability of open-source AI models (such as DeepSeek or Llama, to give you an idea).
The statement released by Nvidia sets out its commitment to keeping the platform open, to allowing anyone to upload and download models and datasets, and, above all, to continuing to support competitors’ chips. Jensen Huang reiterated this point in a post on the company blog, stating that Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire ecosystem.
