It's official: Nvidia is buying Hugging Face for $13 billion

Jensen Huang said Nvidia would scale Hugging Face's platform. Philip FONG / AFP via Getty Images Nvidia has confirmed that it's buying Hugging Face for almost $13 billion, giving the chipmaker a foothold in the open-model ecosystem.Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang wrote in a Thursday blog post that his company had agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12,930,300,000, confirming Business Insider's previous report that the two were in talks for a deal."Together, we will scale Hugging Face's platform, strengthen its infrastructure and expand access to AI for developers and institutions worldwide," Huang wrote.Hugging Face, a platform for sharing and building with open-source AI models, will benefit from more compute and support from Nvidia, Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue said in an X post.The acquisition is one of Nvidia's largest ever and could help propel the chip giant further into open-source AI, a type of software in which the underlying code or model weights are publicly available for others to inspect, modify, and build on.As companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI continue to dominate the market for closed models, investing in an open-source ecosystem could prevent Nvidia from being squeezed out."As the opportunity for open models accelerates, Hugging Face can serve the global AI community at unprecedented scale," Huang wrote in the Thursday blog post.The companies said Hugging Face would remain an open platform and compute-agnostic.In July, OpenAI said its AI agents broke out of containment and hacked Hugging Face, raising concerns about the risks posed by rogue AI. Speaking on CNBC on Thursday, Delangue said that the moment was a "turning point" as the company turned to open models to defend itself. In July, Nvidia joined a host of tech companies in signing a letter urging US policymakers to support open-source AI. Hugging Face had been fielding wider M&A interest for a deal that could value it at $13 billion or more, Business Insider reported in August. When asked on CNBC who else was interested in acquiring Hugging Face, Huang said: "It doesn't matter who the other bidders were; it only matters who wins."The deal includes a $11.9 billion purchase price payable to Hugging Face stockholders and an equity retention plan of up to about $1 billion for Hugging Face employees joining Nvidia, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Read next Hugh is a senior correspondent at Business Insider where he writes about Google, tech, and wealth. His work has been cited by The New York Times, Bloomberg, Reuters, The Wall Street Journal, and other outlets.Get an alert whenever I publish a story.Got a tip? You can reach him using the secure messaging app Signal (hughlangley.01) or email (hlangley@businessinsider.com). We can keep sources anonymous. Tech AI