Nvidia confirms $12.9B Hugging Face acquisition as AI security and enterprise tools advance

Hugging Face has become a key distribution point for open-source AI models, and the purchase price is manageable for Nvidia, which generated $24 billion in cash flow in its last quarter alone, the report noted.

Analyst Zeus Kerravala, cited by SiliconANGLE, described the acquisition as a strategic hedge. "A thriving ecosystem of thousands of specialized models generates more aggregate compute demand than a handful of dominant closed APIs, and it hedges Nvidia against Meta Platforms, OpenAI and Microsoft building their own accelerators," he said.

The deal came during another fast-moving week in AI model development, with Google, Meta, Anthropic, OpenAI and World Labs all releasing new versions. The same wave of activity is creating fresh security demands. CrowdStrike, at its annual Fal.Con conference in Las Vegas, launched its own security frontier models and other AI products. CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz told SiliconANGLE that the AI control plane is the next frontier for cybersecurity.

In other enterprise news reported by SiliconANGLE this week, VMware introduced VMware Private AI Cloud at its Explore conference in Las Vegas, a product aimed at giving enterprises more control over AI workloads. A court ruled that Google does not have to divest the business that places ads on other websites. SoftBank's AI infrastructure unit is going public despite having no revenue so far.

AI continued to influence technology earnings, although investors were selective. GitLab's stock jumped 17% after it beat second-quarter estimates, and Samsara rose on a strong earnings beat and solid outlook. Snowflake and Dell also drew investor buying, while Broadcom, HPE, NetApp, UiPath and MongoDB saw little reward despite broadly positive numbers. By contrast, Asana shares fell on weak third-quarter guidance, C3.ai dropped 5% on weak second-quarter revenue guidance, and Sprinklr lost 7% as revenue grew only about 1%.

Microsoft will start disclosing Azure quarterly revenue as it consolidates its business units. In funding, The Information reported that Thinking Machines Lab is in talks to raise $5 billion to $6 billion led by Accel, with Nvidia expected to invest about $2.5 billion. Other money moves reported by SiliconANGLE include Clay raising at a $7 billion pre-money valuation, Physical Superintelligence raising $58 million for a physics lab staffed by virtual physicists, and Aslan raising $20.8 million for AI undercover agents.

Oracle and Adobe are the only major companies scheduled to report earnings next week. A quiet stretch ends Sept. 15, when Salesforce hosts Dreamforce in San Francisco and the AI Infra Summit opens in Santa Clara.