Nvidia has agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12,93-billion.
“Together, we will scale Hugging Face’s platform, strengthen its infrastructure and expand access to AI for developers and institutions worldwide,” says Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in a post announcing the acquisition
He points out that more than 18-million developers, researchers and creators use Hugging Face to share more than 3-million models, 500 000 datasets and 1-million applications. And more than 200 000 companies use the platform to discover, evaluate, customise and deploy AI.
“Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the AI ecosystem,” Huang says. “Developers will choose the models they want, the frameworks they want, the clouds and inference service providers they want and the computing platforms they want. Nvidia compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face.
“Hugging Face will continue to support open source and open weight models from across the ecosystem, from every model builder. It will continue to support multi-cloud and multi-accelerator development and deployment, so builders can use the hardware and infrastructure that best fit their work.”
Huang points to the open letter he recently co-authored on the importance of open weights to the AI economy. “Joined by leaders from across the industry, we made a simple point: open weights broaden access to AI and help ensure that AI leadership is distributed across companies, institutions and communities.
“Open models let startups, businesses, universities and public institutions build on advanced capabilities without training every model from scratch,” he says. “They enable organisations to match the right model to the right job. That is how AI can advance safely, strengthen cybersecurity and sovereignty, accelerate innovation, and reach factories, hospitals, farms, classrooms and Main Street businesses around the world.
“AI advances faster when people can build together,” Huang adds.
“Nvidia has been committed to open weight models for years, demonstrated by multiyear investments and major contributions to open source platforms, including Hugging Face. Nvidia has said that open models, data and tools broaden access to AI, and it has contributed hundreds of open models and datasets to Hugging Face as part of that effort.”
He adds that Nvidia is the largest contributor of open models and data to Hugging Face, having released more than 500 models on Hugging Face and more than 250 open datasets.