Nvidia announced Thursday it will buy artificial intelligence platform Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, as the chipmaking giant seeks to diversify its hold on the AI sector.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang confirmed the deal first reported by US media last month in a statement on the company’s website.
“$12.9 billion is what it took to close the deal, and it’s worth every single penny,” Huang told US broadcaster CNBC on Thursday after the deal was announced.
The price is a marked increase from the $7 billion valuation that was the basis of initial negotiations with Nvidia late last year, according to US media reports.
Founded in 2016 in New York by three French entrepreneurs, Hugging Face — whose name is inspired by an emoji — describes itself as “the AI community building the future.”
The company touts open models, which can be downloaded and modified, as opposed to closed models like those of rivals OpenAI or Anthropic.
Huang said that Nvidia would not be changing Hugging Face’s core model with the acquisition.
“Hugging Face will continue to support open source and open weight models from across the ecosystem, from every model builder,” he said, adding it would “remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem.”
According to Nvidia’s statement, the AI platform has more than 18 million users, who have created more than 3 million models and more than a million applications.
Speaking to CNBC, Huang said the company’s “vision was spot on” for being focused on open models.
“At a time when open models are accelerating, this is really a very, very delicate time, and we want to make sure that it has all the support necessary,” he said.
The Nvidia CEO said open models were crucial for his company’s growth.
“Together we can scale open community even faster than they’re able to do today, which will be great for Nvidia,” he said.
Hugging Face co-founder Clem Delangue said he, his two co-founders, and the entire Hugging Face would remain on and join Nvidia as part of the new move.
“The goal really is to join Nvidia, to continue to run an independently neutral platform within the Nvidia team,” he told CNBC.
Open Models
The advent of AI agents capable of carrying out tasks autonomously has led to soaring demand for computing power.
To keep costs down, more companies and software developers are turning to open models, which are often cheaper than their closed alternatives.
Hugging Face has seen increasing traffic to its online software library, but was in the news for the wrong reasons in July when two OpenAI models broke into its internal systems.
The models were not authorized to do so and should have been operating in a closed environment, OpenAI said.
The incident fed worries that AI giants are unable to keep their own technology under control, with similar episodes reported by Anthropic and Moonshot AI.
Nvidia is best known for its GPUs, specialized chips originally designed to render gaming graphics at high speed, which have more recently become the engine for chatbots and other AI tools.
AFP
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