Nvidia confirms it will buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion

Nvidia has acquired Hugging Face, a platform that hosts millions of AI models, applications, and datasets used by millions of developers, for $12.93 billion. The acquisition matters because Nvidia, a dominant hardware platform for AI development, gains control of an open ecosystem that can be suited for its chips while maintaining the platform's openness to developers who can choose their preferred models, frameworks, and computing platforms. Hugging Face rejected a smaller offer from Nvidia previously but came to this agreement because it needed more computing resources and support to scale its operations. The deal reflects Nvidia's broader investment in open-source AI models, which the company argues are vital to cybersecurity and the economy.