US Justice Department reviews Nvidia’s $12.9 billion deal with Hugging Face — CNBC

The US Department of Justice is investigating Nvidia’s acquisition of the Hugging Face platform for $12.9 billion and has requested information from the company on how the deal could affect competitors. CNBC reports, citing a source familiar with the review.

The deal was announced in September

Nvidia announced its nearly $13 billion acquisition of Hugging Face in September. At the time, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang wrote that the deal was intended to help expand access to artificial intelligence for developers and institutions in different countries.

Hugging Face operates a widely used open-source platform for hosting and testing artificial intelligence models. The company also sells infrastructure tools and collaboration tools to organizations working with closed proprietary AI systems, including chipmakers.

More current news is available on the UA.News Telegram channel Telegram.

Platform scale

At the time the deal was announced, Nvidia said that Hugging Face was used by more than 18 million people and over 200,000 companies. According to those figures, users had shared at least 3 million models and 500,000 datasets on the platform.

The acquisition of Hugging Face became Nvidia’s second-largest purchase by value after its $20 billion deal involving Groq assets at the end of the previous year. That deal also drew the attention of the US Department of Justice. Nvidia declined to comment on the agency’s request.