Nvidia has agreed to acquire artificial intelligence platform Hugging Face for $12.9 billion.
If completed, the transaction would rank among Nvidia’s largest acquisitions as the chipmaker continues to expand its presence across the AI industry.
New York based Hugging Face operates a platform for open source AI models and datasets, including large language models.
An acquisition would give Nvidia control of a major platform within the open source AI ecosystem, as AI companies increasingly explore alternatives to relying solely on Nvidia’s graphics processing units.
The reported acquisition value is significantly higher than Hugging Face’s reported annualised revenue of $150 million.
The company was valued at $4.5 billion in 2023 after raising $235 million in a funding round backed by Nvidia, Salesforce and Google.
Hugging Face had previously rejected a $500 million investment proposal from Nvidia that would have valued the company at $7 billion, according to reports earlier this year.
The reported deal comes as Nvidia signals continued confidence in demand for AI infrastructure.
The company on Wednesday forecast a 70% increase in revenue for its next fiscal year and said it had committed $18 billion towards equity investments through fiscal 2027.
The development also follows a recent security incident involving Hugging Face infrastructure. An OpenAI model reportedly triggered a hack that compromised the platform.
Hugging Face CEO and co-founder Clément Delangue described the incident as “very weird and unprecedented” and said it underscored risks associated with autonomous AI systems.
Delangue has argued that cyberattacks conducted by AI agents should remain illegal and called for mandatory disclosure and greater transparency around such incidents. He also advocated access to records detailing what AI agents were instructed to do and the actions they subsequently carried out.
