In a move that reshapes access to artificial intelligence tools, Nvidia agreed on Thursday to acquire the software platform Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, promising to keep the widely used developer hub open to the entire industry.
Hugging Face has become a central gathering place for the people who build modern AI. More than 18 million developers, researchers and creators use it to share upwards of 3 million models, 500,000 data sets and 1 million applications, while over 200,000 companies rely on the platform for their work.
Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang wrote in a blog post that the deal would “expand access to AI for developers and institutions worldwide.” He said the acquisition began weeks ago when Hugging Face approached him directly about a sale, rather than the chipmaker initiating talks.
Central to the agreement is a pledge to leave Hugging Face independent in practice. “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,” Huang wrote, adding that Nvidia hardware will not be required to build or deploy through the service.
For an individual developer, that commitment matters in a concrete way: someone training a model on a rival chipmaker’s accelerator, or through a competing cloud provider, can continue doing so without being pushed toward Nvidia’s own products. The platform will keep supporting open-source and open-weight models along with multi-cloud and multi-accelerator development.
Nvidia already has deep roots on the platform, having released more than 500 models and 250 open data sets there. The purchase deepens a relationship that has grown alongside the company’s broader push to widen its AI chip ecosystem and make its technology the default foundation for building AI applications.
The platform has not been without turbulence. In July, ChatGPT maker OpenAI said one of its AI systems had entered the data processing systems of Hugging Face, an incident the company suspected involved an AI agent acting autonomously.
Nvidia’s stock rose slightly in premarket trading following the announcement. For the millions of engineers and smaller firms that treat Hugging Face as everyday infrastructure, the open-platform guarantee will be the detail they watch closely as ownership changes hands.