Nvidia Agrees to Acquire AI Platform Hugging Face for $12.9bn, Reports Say
Nvidia has agreed to acquire AI platform Hugging Face for $12.9bn, according to reports, in one of the biggest deals of the generative AI era.
The Information first reported the deal on Wednesday, citing a person familiar with the matter. Hugging Face, founded in 2016 by French entrepreneurs Clément Delangue, Thomas Wolf and Julien Chaumond, is widely known as the “GitHub of machine learning”. Its platform lets developers discover, share and deploy AI models, and it has championed open-source AI over the closed systems of companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic.
Hugging Face last raised funding at a $4.5bn valuation in 2023, with backing from Sequoia Capital, Coatue, Google, Amazon, Nvidia, Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, IBM and Salesforce. Although headquartered in New York, the company has long presented itself as a French-American firm, with its largest office in Paris.
Speaking to Sifted in 2024, cofounder Julien Chaumond said the company's global ambitions made raising capital in the US “unavoidable”, even as it continued to build much of its engineering team in Europe.
The acquisition would deepen Nvidia's influence across the AI stack. Best known for its GPUs that power leading AI models, the tech giant has increasingly invested in software and developer tools as demand grows for open AI models and autonomous AI agents that require vast amounts of computing power.