Nvidia reportedly acquires AI project hosting platform Hugging Face for $12.9B
Nvidia Corp. has reportedly bought Hugging Face Inc., a startup with a popular platform for hosting open-source artificial intelligence projects.
Rumors that an acquisition was in the cards first leaked on Monday. Business Insider broke the news that Hugging Face had received interest from multiple prospective buyers. On late Wednesday, The Information reported that Nvidia clinched the deal for $12.9 billion. It’s believed the chipmaker joined the fray after Salesforce Inc. expressed takeover interest.
Hugging Face launched in 2016 with a chatbot service for teens. Two years later, it open-sourced a framework for building AI applications. The company launched its flagship product, a GitHub-like platform for hosting open-source AI models, in 2020.
Hugging Face currently hosts more than 2 million models. Developers can also access tens of thousands of free training datasets, user-created AI applications called Spaces and other technical assets. Nvidia is among the companies that use Hugging Face to host their open-source AI projects.
