Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $12.9 billion
Nvidia has agreed to acquire the open-source artificial intelligence platform Hugging Face for $12.9 billion. The deal will expand the chipmaker’s presence in AI beyond hardware, CNBC Top News reports.
Plans for the platform
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang wrote in a blog post that Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem. According to him, the companies will scale the Hugging Face platform, strengthen its infrastructure, and expand access to artificial intelligence for developers and institutions around the world.
Huang also said that Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue approached him when considering the company’s next stage of development. According to the Nvidia chief, Delangue considered Nvidia the right home for Hugging Face, its community, and the future of open models.
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Nvidia’s second-largest deal
The acquisition of Hugging Face will become Nvidia’s second-largest deal. The company’s biggest deal was the purchase of chipmaker Groq’s assets for $20 billion in December. Before that, Nvidia’s largest acquisition was the purchase of Israeli chipmaker Mellanox for nearly $7 billion in 2019.
Nvidia became the world’s most valuable company amid high demand for its graphics processors, which enabled the development of generative AI. Hugging Face recently found itself at the center of a hacking incident that raised concerns over the rapid development of powerful AI tools and cybersecurity. Delangue linked the attack to engineering mistakes and said the company used a version of Nvidia’s Chinese open model to deal with the consequences of the incident.
