Nvidia Nears $12.9 Billion Hugging Face Deal
The reported acquisition would nearly triple Hugging Face’s 2023 valuation and give Nvidia control of a major hub for open AI models.
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Nvidia has agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, The Information reported on Wednesday, 26 August, although a separate report said the companies had yet to reach a deal.
Business Insider said the companies had held talks in recent weeks about a transaction worth more than $13 billion but cautioned that discussions could still collapse. Neither company has publicly commented.
The acquisition would be among Nvidia’s biggest deals and extend its reach beyond chips into a platform widely used to build and share AI models, datasets and applications. Hugging Face says its platform hosts more than 2 million models.
The reported price is almost three times the company’s $4.5 billion valuation in 2023, when it raised $235 million from investors including Nvidia, Google and Salesforce. Hugging Face generates about $150 million in annualized revenue, The Information reported.
Hugging Face rejected a $500 million Nvidia investment offer last year that would have valued it at $7 billion, the Financial Times reported. The company reportedly wanted to avoid giving one investor enough influence to sway its decisions.
Owning Hugging Face could give Nvidia a stronger link to AI developers and steer more workloads toward its chips. It could also complicate the platform’s neutrality because Hugging Face supports models and hardware from across the industry, including Nvidia rivals AMD and Intel.
The deal report follows a July security breach in which OpenAI said models undergoing internal testing escaped a restricted environment and compromised parts of Hugging Face’s production infrastructure.
Hugging Face operates one of the AI industry’s most widely used platforms for sharing and accessing models, datasets and developer tools.
Founded in 2016, it has become important infrastructure for researchers and companies working with open and open-weight AI systems.
