Nvidia Agreed to Buy Hugging Face for About $13 Billion
The deal would be Nvidia’s second-largest acquisition and expands its role in open-source artificial intelligence infrastructure.
Nvidia agreed to acquire Hugging Face for about $13 billion, expanding the chipmaker’s presence in open-source artificial intelligence and making the transaction its second-largest acquisition.
The deal follows Nvidia’s $20 billion purchase of assets from AI chip startup Groq in December. Nvidia announced the Hugging Face transaction on Sept. 3.
Hugging Face CEO and co-founder Clément Delangue said he viewed Nvidia as a suitable long-term home for the company. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang described the deal as a way to expand Hugging Face’s platform, strengthen its infrastructure and increase access for developers and institutions.
Nvidia invested in Hugging Face in 2023, when the company was valued at $4.5 billion. Nvidia has also invested $30 billion in OpenAI, which is a major customer of the chipmaker.
Founded in 2016, Hugging Face has become a major platform for developers working with open-weight AI models. These models can be downloaded, modified and run on infrastructure selected by users, often at lower cost than proprietary alternatives.
Hugging Face has also expanded its storage and infrastructure offerings. Its platform is used by developers seeking tools to build and deploy artificial intelligence applications.
The acquisition follows a July incident involving OpenAI agents and Hugging Face. Nvidia previously said new AI tools could have prevented the incident, which intensified attention on controls for autonomous AI systems.
