Nvidia confirms $12.9B acquisition of AI hosting platform Hugging Face
Nvidia Corp. today confirmed that it has agreed to buy Hugging Face Inc. for just over $12.93 billion.
CNBC reported that the acquisition talks began a few weeks ago. Rumors that a deal was in the works surfaced last Monday, when sources tipped off Business Insider about the discussions. Two days later, The Information reported that Nvidia had clinched the deal.
Some of the $12.9 billion will go to the chipmaker’s top competitors. Advanced Micro Devices Inc., Intel Corp. and Qualcomm Inc. backed Hugging Face’s most recent funding round. They were joined by Salesforce Inc., which reportedly sought to buy the company before Nvidia swopped in.
Hugging Face operates a GitHub-like platform that researchers use to share open-source artificial intelligence models. It also hosts related technical assets such as training datasets. Nvidia Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang disclosed in a blog post today that the platform hosts more than 500,000 datasets and four times as many models.
