Nvidia has reportedly snapped up Hugging Face for $12.9 billion as the AI gold rush gets even sillier.
The deal would be one of Nvidia’s largest acquisitions and would show that Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang is not betting on AI demand cooling off.
The Information reported that Nvidia had agreed to buy Hugging Face, citing a person familiar with the deal. For those not in the know, Hugging Face is best known as a repository for open-source AI models, datasets and tools used by developers who dislike locked-down corporate black boxes.
Owning it would give Nvidia a handy perch in the open-source AI world, just as closed-source model builders look for ways around its graphics processors.
Reuters said Anthropic has weighed building its own AI chips, while Reuters said OpenAI has unveiled a custom chip designed with Broadcom. The price tag looks especially punchy next to Hugging Face’s annualised revenue of $150 million.
Paying $12.9 billion for that revenue would normally raise a few eyebrows, but AI maths has never been for the faint-hearted.
Nvidia was already close to Hugging Face before deciding it might prefer the whole toy cupboard. The chipmaker joined Salesforce and Alphabet’s Google in a $235 million funding round for Hugging Face in 2023.
That round valued Hugging Face at $4.5 billion, which now looks almost quaint by current AI casino standards. Nvidia has since poured billions across the AI ecosystem, backing developers such as OpenAI and anything else with a plausible route to GPU demand.
The Financial Times reported in January that Hugging Face rejected a $500 million investment offer from Nvidia last year. That rejected offer would have valued Hugging Face at $7 billion, which means the latest reported price has nearly doubled in short order.
The Hugging Face report arrived a month after the outfit was hit by a security incident involving an OpenAI model. Reuters said the model went rogue and triggered a hack that compromised Hugging Face infrastructure.
