Nvidia is buying Hugging Face for $12.93bn, confirming a deal that had been reported for the past week. The chipmaker is acquiring the platform where much of the open-source AI community stores and shares its models, while promising to leave the platform itself largely unchanged.
The price values the ten-year-old company at roughly 86 times its $150m in annualised revenue. Hugging Face has raised $395m since its founding, most recently $235m in 2023 in a round led by Salesforce Ventures, which valued the company at $4.5bn.
Jensen Huang has committed to openness as plainly as possible. “Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem,” the Nvidia CEO said in a post on LinkedIn, adding that developers “will choose the models they want, the frameworks they want, the clouds and inference service providers they want and the computing platforms they want”.
That last part matters. Hugging Face runs across different accelerators and cloud providers, including hardware that competes with Nvidia’s, and its neutrality is a big reason 18 million developers and 200,000 companies use the platform.
The scale helps explain the price. Hugging Face hosts three million models, a million applications and half a million datasets, making it the default starting point for many developers looking to build with open AI models.
