Hugging Face Approached Nvidia Weeks Ahead of the Now Confirmed $12.9B Acquisition

IBL News | New York

Moving beyond hardware and further up the AI stack, Nvidia last Thursday officially agreed to buy open-source platform Hugging Face for $12.9 billion.

This is Nvidia’s second-biggest, following the $20 billion purchase of assets from chipmaker Groq in December. Before that, its largest deal was the purchase of Israeli chipmaker Mellanox for almost $7 billion in 2019.

Nvidia’s stated goal is to keep Hugging Face as an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang wrote in a blog post Thursday. “Together, we will scale Hugging Face’s platform, strengthen its infrastructure and expand access to AI for developers and institutions worldwide,” he wrote.

Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue revealed that he recently approached Huang about a deal, thinking that Nvidia was “a perfect home for his company.”

“We realized that Hugging Face and open-source AI in general were at the turning point, and that it needed more, more resources, more scale, more visibility,” he said.

Nvidia has become the world’s most valuable company due to the growing demand for its graphics processing units, which power the AI boom.

IBL News | New York

Moving beyond hardware and further up the AI stack, Nvidia last Thursday officially agreed to buy open-source platform Hugging Face for $12.9 billion.

Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue revealed that he recently approached Huang about a deal, thinking that Nvidia was “a perfect home for his company.”

“We realized that Hugging Face and open-source AI in general were at the turning point, and that it needed more, more resources, more scale, more visibility,” he said.

Nvidia has become the world’s most valuable company due to the growing demand for its graphics processing units, which power the AI boom.