Nvidia acquires Hugging Face in push for open-source technology

The technology giant Nvidia will acquire the open-source platform Hugging Face for nearly $13 billion as part of the company’s push for open artificial intelligence systems.

In an announcement Thursday, Nvidia said it will pay $12.93 billion for Hugging Face’s platform, which hosts more than 3 million models and 500,000 datasets used by hundreds of thousands of other companies.

“Together, we will scale Hugging Face’s platform, strengthen its infrastructure and expand access to AI for developers and institutions worldwide,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang wrote in a statement.

Huang said Hugging Face will remain an open platform under the deal.

It comes just more than a month after Nvidia launched its open-source initiative , the Open Secure AI Alliance, for companies to collaborate on open-source tools to identify, patch and disclose security vulnerabilities across infrastructure.

Hugging Face is one of the main collaborators on this project.

“Open models let startups, businesses, universities and public institutions build on advanced capabilities without training every model from scratch,” the announcement said. “They enable organizations to match the right model to the right job.”

Discussions around open-source models ramped up earlier this summer after three AI firms — OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta — revealed their models hacked into other company systems during cybersecurity testing.

Unlike private models hosted by OpenAI and Anthropic, open-source systems are often smaller, less expensive and live in the public domain. This gives virtually anyone or any company access to download and customize the model for a wide range of uses.

Steam picked up in recent months for more open-source development in the U.S., given the rising costs of private, proprietary models like Claude and ChatGPT, and the need to stay ahead of China’s AI development.

Nvidia’s Hugging Face acquisition is the latest in a series of deals for the chipmaker. The company announced last month it is partnering with various Wall Street investment firms to use more than $500 billion in third-party capital for the build-out of AI infrastructure.