Nvidia plans to acquire Hugging Face for about $12.9 billion, securing the central platform for open AI models. More than 18 million developers and 200,000 companies use the hub. CEO Jensen Huang promises to keep the platform open and hardware-neutral, but the deal also hands him a powerful distribution channel for compute.

Nvidia will buy popular developer platform Hugging Face for US$12.93 billion, betting that support for open AI models will drive future demand even as its biggest customers…

It was already rumored, but now we know.

GPU giant pledges to keep the model hub open to the entire AI ecosystem

The AI chipmaker says it will keep Hugging Face as an open platform