Nvidia has announced its acquisition of Hugging Face, the platform that has become the default home for open-source artificial intelligence development, for $12.93bn (€11.1bn), the chipmaker's chief executive Jensen Huang announced on Wednesday.
The deal brings together two companies that sit at opposite ends of the AI supply chain but have grown increasingly dependent on each other.
Nvidia makes the graphics processing units that train and run almost every major AI model in use today, giving it enormous leverage over the hardware side of the industry.
Hugging Face, by contrast, has built its influence by staying open and largely neutral — it hosts more than three million AI models, 500,000 datasets and one million applications, used by more than 18 million developers and 200,000 companies to build, test and deploy AI systems regardless of which company's chips or cloud they run on.
For Nvidia, buying that platform means owning not just the infrastructure AI runs on, but a direct relationship with the developers who decide what gets built and how.
