AI Chat Daily / Economic Times
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NvidiaHugging FaceAcquisitionOpen SourceNvidia Agrees to Buy Hugging Face for $12.9 Billion
August 27, 20264 min read
Nvidia has agreed to acquire Hugging Face, the leading open-source AI model and dataset hub, in a deal valued at approximately $12.9 billion — nearly triple the company’s 2023 valuation of $4.5 billion.
Why it matters
The acquisition gives Nvidia direct control of the most important open-source AI platform and further consolidates its influence across both the hardware and software layers of the AI stack.
Nvidia has agreed to acquire Hugging Face for approximately $12.9 billion. The deal values the New York-based open-source AI hub at nearly three times the $4.5 billion mark it carried in 2023.
Hugging Face hosts the largest public collection of open-source models, datasets, and tools used by researchers and developers worldwide. Bringing it under Nvidia’s ownership gives the chipmaker a central position in the open-source ecosystem at a time when open-weight models are increasingly competitive with closed frontier systems.
The transaction is one of the largest pure AI software/platform acquisitions to date and raises questions about the future independence of the open-source model distribution layer.