Nvidia Agrees to Acquire Hugging Face for $12.9 Billion, Expanding its Control of Open-Source AI Models:

Nvidia Corp. (NASDAQ:NVDA) has reportedly agreed to acquire Hugging Face, an open-source AI model repository, for a staggering $12.9 billion.

This acquisition will provide Nvidia with control over Hugging Face, a platform known for hosting open-source large language models and datasets, The Information reported late Wednesday. This would be one of the largest acquisitions made by Nvidia so far, behind the $20 billion Groq acquisition.

The deal’s valuation is significantly higher than the New York-based startup’s $150 million annualized revenue, as reported by the publication earlier this week.

Nvidia was among the investors in Hugging Face’s $235 million funding round in 2023, along with Salesforce Inc. (NYSE:CRM) and Alphabet Inc.‘s Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL) (NASDAQ:GOOG), which valued the AI startup at $4.5 billion.

This development is particularly noteworthy as closed-source model builders like Anthropic and OpenAI are exploring alternatives to Nvidia’s graphics processing units. This acquisition could be one of the largest by Nvidia so far, as per reports.