NVIDIA has agreed to acquire Hugging Face, the AI development platform, for $12.93 billion, the company announced today. The deal is intended to scale Hugging Face's platform and infrastructure, and to expand access to AI for developers and institutions. No closing date or regulatory approval details were disclosed.
Hugging Face is used by more than 18 million people, among them developers, researchers and creators, and hosts over 3 million models, 500,000 datasets, and 1 million applications. NVIDIA says Hugging Face will keep backing open weight and open source models, and will stay a multi-cloud, multi-accelerator platform, meaning developers can build and deploy without using NVIDIA compute. The Hugging Face brand will be kept, according to the announcement.
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NVIDIA has released more than 500 models and over 250 open datasets on Hugging Face. The company says it has been committed to open weight models for years, and recently coauthored an open letter on the importance of open weights, which broaden access to AI. NVIDIA builds models, libraries, and tools in the open.
NVIDIA says its engineering resources and global scale could help make Hugging Face more reliable and safer, and could strengthen model evaluation as well as inference and deployment. The Hugging Face team will bring its expertise to a larger canvas, according to the announcement. The deal was announced after Clem approached NVIDIA about the next chapter for the platform.
