After weeks of speculation, Nvidia has officially announced today that it is acquiring Hugging Face in a deal valued at $12.93 billion. Hugging Face’s platform currently hosts three million models, one million applications used by more than 18 million developers, and half a million datasets. In a blog post, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang stated that Hugging Face will keep supporting open-source and open-weight models while also working to broaden developer access. “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,” said Huang.

Huang highlighted Nvidia’s own contributions, noting that the chipmaker has released over 500 models and 250 open datasets on Hugging Face. He argued that the company develops open models to encourage developers worldwide to adopt them. For a hardware giant like Nvidia, which dominates AI development and inference infrastructure, having an open ecosystem under its control is advantageous, as it can tailor that platform to optimize for its own chips.

Hugging Face was founded in 2016 and has raised more than $395 million in total funding, according to Crunchbase. Its most recent funding round took place in 2023, when it secured $235 million led by Salesforce Ventures, with participation from Google, Amazon, IBM, and Nvidia. In a post on X, Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue thanked the community for proving that the company could serve as an alternative to closed-source APIs. “But for it to happen at [a] larger scale, it needs more compute, more support, more collaboration, and more visibility. That’s why we went to talk to Jensen, who offered to do exactly that with us,” said Delangue.

Hugging Face has grown significantly in prominence as new models are released daily. Last year, the company turned down a $500 million offer from Nvidia, as reported by the Financial Times. Just last month, The Information indicated that Hugging Face is generating around $150 million in annualized revenue.

Nvidia’s Huang has long been a vocal advocate for open models. He recently co-signed a letter with several other organizations urging support for open-weight models to help strengthen the United States’ competitive edge against rivals like China in the AI arena. The company is also pouring resources into model development. Last month, The Wall Street Journal reported that Nvidia struck a $6 billion deal with coding startup Poolside to build open models. During its latest earnings call, Nvidia revealed it has invested over $50 billion in AI frontier labs.

Huang championed open models while responding to an analyst’s question, pointing out that nearly all open models operate on Nvidia hardware. He also stressed their importance in cybersecurity. “One of the areas where frontier models are vital is cybersecurity. You see the number of cybersecurity companies that are enabled by frontier models so that they could have massively distributed, continuously running autonomous cybersecurity systems to defend. Those companies are emerging. There are some amazing companies. They couldn’t do it without open models. And so open models is both incredibly successful and have finally reached the frontier, but they’re also vital to the American economy. It’s vital to the world economy,” he said.

In July, Delangue noted that Nvidia’s open model helped Hugging Face fend off cyberattacks after proprietary models failed to protect the platform. Just days earlier, OpenAI admitted that one of its unreleased models had breached Hugging Face’s defenses.