Nvidia nears $12.9B deal to acquire Hugging Face
Nvidia has agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, The Information reported Wednesday night, citing a source familiar with the matter. Business Insider, which first reported over the weekend that Hugging Face was fielding takeover interest, said late Wednesday that talks valuing the company at more than $13 billion had not yet produced a signed agreement and could still fall apart. Nvidia and Hugging Face have not responded to requests for comment from TechCrunch.
Hugging Face, founded in 2016, is a leading hub where developers share and download open-source AI models. According to TechCrunch, an acquisition would give Nvidia a stronger foothold in open-source AI at a time when major closed-source labs including OpenAI, Google, Amazon and Anthropic are developing their own chips to reduce dependence on Nvidia hardware. A thriving open-source ecosystem gives customers alternatives to those labs while keeping demand tied to Nvidia’s chips.
Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue has publicly backed Nvidia’s open-source push this year, including signing a letter with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and other companies urging Washington to support open-weight models rather than restrict them, amid concerns about Chinese labs like Moonshot AI.
The deal would also mark a return for Nvidia to cloud computing, since Hugging Face already helps developers rent computing power to run AI models, TechCrunch reported. It could additionally let Nvidia resell unused cloud capacity from its infrastructure commitments to customers.
The reported price is a sharp jump from Hugging Face’s 2023 funding round, which valued it at $4.5 billion. Hugging Face previously turned down a $500 million Nvidia investment last year at a $7 billion valuation. The company was recently generating about $150 million in annual revenue, per The Information, and is said to be close to profitability.
Based on reporting by techcrunch.com.
