When Nvidia said Thursday that it plans to pay $13 billion to acquire Hugging Face, the question arose of whether the open AI platform would remain open when it becomes a unit of Nvidia. And the current lack of a single viable open alternative that does everything Hugging Face does for enterprises adds further complications for CIOs.
Rumors of the pending deal have been circulating for at least a week.
In its announcement, Nvidia said, “Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem. 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. Nvidia compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face.”
It added that Hugging Face will continue to support open source and open weight models from every model builder, and “continue to support multi-cloud and multi-accelerator development and deployment, so builders can use the hardware and infrastructure that best fit their work.”
Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue took to his X account to also reassure customers, noting, “open-source AI is at an inflection point” and pointing out that, for the business to scale, it needs “more compute, more support, more collaboration and more visibility. That’s why we went to talk to [Nvidia CEO] Jensen [Huang], who offered to do exactly that with us.”
