Nvidia confirms $12.9 billion acquisition of Hugging Face

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in the announcement that Hugging Face would remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem. He wrote that Nvidia’s “infrastructure, engineering and global reach” would help strengthen the platform’s reliability, safety, model evaluation, inference and deployment capabilities.

The platform currently counts more than 18 million developers, researchers and creators as users, with more than three million models shared on it. Nvidia said it is already the biggest contributor to Hugging Face, having shared more than 500 models and roughly 250 open datasets.

Huang stressed that Hugging Face will continue to support open-source and open-weight models from across the ecosystem, from every model builder. The pledge appeared intended to ease concerns about whether Nvidia’s GPUs and software could receive preferential treatment once Nvidia owns the platform. A pending regulatory review is expected to examine the deal.

The acquisition was confirmed less than two weeks after reports emerged about a possible deal. The total consideration consists of an $11.9 billion valuation for Hugging Face, up from the $4.5 billion valuation the company had in 2023, plus about $1 billion in an equity-based retention program. If it closes, the deal would be Nvidia’s largest acquisition to date.

In a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Nvidia warned that government restrictions could negatively affect its business and the Hugging Face platform.