Nvidia is reportedly seeking to acquire Hugging Face for nearly $13 billion, potentially bringing a major open-source AI model and developer ecosystem under its control.
Nvidia is reportedly in talks to acquire Hugging Face in a deal that could value the open-source AI platform at nearly $13 billion, potentially giving the chipmaker greater influence over open-source AI software and model development.
Business Insider reported that Nvidia and Hugging Face have held acquisition discussions in recent weeks, citing a person familiar with the talks. The Information separately reported that Nvidia had agreed to purchase Hugging Face for $12.9 billion. Nvidia has not publicly confirmed an agreement and did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Hugging Face is a major open-source AI platform hosting machine-learning models, datasets, development tools and community features widely used by researchers and developers. Its acquisition could give Nvidia greater access to the software and community layer of AI, complementing its dominance in chips and computing infrastructure.
The deal would extend Nvidia’s expansion beyond GPUs into AI software and infrastructure. The company acquired foundation-model startup Kumo in June and has also purchased ShedMD, Illumex and Groq over the past 12 months.
Nvidia said Wednesday that it had committed approximately $18 billion towards equity investments for the remainder of the year. The Hugging Face reports came hours after Nvidia posted quarterly earnings that exceeded Wall Street expectations and issued a strong current-quarter forecast.
A deal of this size would underscore the growing commercial value of open-source AI while potentially placing a major model, dataset and developer ecosystem under Nvidia’s ownership.
