File picture of Nvidia chief executive officer Jensen Huang. Announcing the acquisition on Thursday, Jensen Huang said Hugging Face has become a major hub for the global AI community, with more than 18 million developers, researchers and creators using the platform. REUTERS
San Francisco: Nvidia has agreed to acquire artificial intelligence
platform Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, marking one of the largest deals in
the AI sector.
Announcing the acquisition on Thursday, Nvidia founder and Chief
Executive Officer Jensen Huang said Hugging Face has become a major hub for the
global AI community, with more than 18 million developers, researchers and
creators using the platform.
According to Huang, Hugging Face hosts more than 3 million AI models,
500,000 datasets and 1 million applications. More than 200,000 companies also
use the platform.
Nvidia said Hugging Face will continue operating as an open platform
serving the broader 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,” Huang said in a blog post.
“Nvidia compute will not be required to build on or deploy through
Hugging Face.”
The company added that Hugging Face will continue supporting open-source
and open-weight AI models, as well as multi-cloud and multi-accelerator
development and deployment.
The acquisition further strengthens Nvidia's position in the rapidly
expanding artificial intelligence market, combining its leadership in AI
computing with one of the industry's largest repositories of AI models,
datasets and applications.
