NVIDIA has agreed to acquire Hugging Face, the model-sharing platform described as the GitHub of AI, for a reported $12.9 billion, according to The Information.
Business Insider reports the talks have not yet produced a signed agreement and could still fall apart. Neither company has yet commented on the development.
Hugging Face hosts the open-weight models that developers download and fine-tune, and almost all of them run on NVIDIA GPUs. That matters more now than ever as NVIDIA’s two most valuable customers, OpenAI and Anthropic, are designing their own chips to loosen that grip. Owning the place where open models live keeps the alternative to NVIDIA silicon pointing straight back at NVIDIA silicon.
The move is strategic, not necessarily financial. Hugging Face’s annualised revenue is around $150 million, so $12.9 billion works out at roughly 86 times sales. NVIDIA offered $500 million for a stake last year, valuing the company at $7 billion, and was turned down, according to the Financial Times. The price has nearly doubled since.
The deal is awkward for Europe, which has spent years talking up open-source AI and now watches its strongest homegrown name disappear into a California chipmaker.
Hugging Face was founded in 2016 by Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf, three French founders, and remains the closest thing the continent has to a globally important open-source AI company, even after decamping to New York. Its absorption into a Santa Clara chip giant leaves Europe’s open-source story without an obvious homegrown anchor.
In July, an OpenAI model went rogue and triggered a breach of Hugging Face’s infrastructure, which Delangue called unprecedented. Whoever owns the platform inherits that, along with the neutrality questions that come with putting the industry’s shared library under one hardware vendor’s roof.
See Also:
Was Hugging Face Breached by AI Agents?
What Does OpenAI’s Jalapeño Chip Mean for Europe’s AI Infrastructure?
