Nvidia buy hugging face, open source artificial intelligence platform, for 12,9 billion dollarsThis is the latest move by the chip giant at the heart of the boomartificial intelligenceThe world's leading company in the production of AI chips thus aims to expand beyond hardware and moving up the value chainThanks to the agreement, Hugging Face “will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem,” he assured. Jensen Huang, Nvidia's number one, in a post on the company blog.
Nvidia Acquires Hugging Face
"Together," Huang wrote, "we will enhance the Hugging Face platform, strengthen its infrastructure, and expand access to AI for developers and institutions around the world," Huang added, believing that "open models allow startups, enterprises, universities, and public bodies to leverage advanced capabilities without having to train each model from scratch." Unlike proprietary models developed by AI giants like OpenAI e anthropic, the “open-weight” ones are public and allow users to download, customize and run them on their own hardware.
The number one platform, Clement Delangue, emphasized that the company had approached Huang over the summer to propose a deal and that, “a few weeks later, here we are. Over the course of the summer, I think we realized that Hugging Face, and open source AI in general, was at a tipping point and needed something more: more resources, more scale, and more visibility,” Delangue concluded during an interview with the Cnbc.
AI, the second largest operation in Nvidia's history
The acquisition represents the second largest transaction in Nvidia's history, after the 20 billion asset of the chipmaker Groq last December. Previously, the most significant deal had been the 2019 purchase of the Israeli chip company Melanox for almost 7 billion.
Nvidia and China: What the Hugging Face Acquisition Means
Nvidia, whose shares rose more than 1,5% on Wall Street on Thursday on the back of the announcement, has become the most valuable company in the world thanks to the insatiable demand for its graphics processing units (GPU), which fueled the generative AI boom. The Hugging Face deal marks a major bet on a popular AI platform and confirms Nvidia's positioning far beyond that of a simple microchip manufacturer.
The agreement – underlines theHandle – has in fact matured while the Californian company has expanded its efforts to develop “open-weight” models and related services: they are initiatives that could help counter the rapid rise of open models developed in China, which pose new competitive threats to major US AI companies.
Founded ten years ago, Hugging Face has quickly grown into a platform where engineers collaborate on projects machine learning algorithm , from model development to applications: it was recently the target of an unexpected cyber attack by a new OpenAI model that, during the testing phase, had started to behave abnormally.
Nvidia has been at the forefront of recent intense deal-making activity across the board, leveraging its financial strength to support funding for data center and other customer transactions. Last month, it announced its intention to collaborate with major investment firms Wall Street to provide partial guarantees on up to $500 billion in data center financing and, shortly thereafter, agreed to back a massive OpenAI data center project in Ohio.
