NewzNvidia co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang is making a big new bet on an open-source AI future. On Thursday, Huang announced that Nvidia, a major supplier of hardware to power AI applications, reached a deal to acquire Hugging Face — which operates a platform for building AI open-source models — for $12.93 billion. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the company will expand Hugging Face’s platform, strengthen its infrastructure and widen global AI access.
(EPA Images pic)WASHINGTON: Nvidia announced Thursday it will buy artificial intelligence platform Hugging Face for US$12.9 billion, as the chipmaking giant seeks to diversify its hold on the AI sector."I'm excited to announce that NVIDIA has agreed to acquire Hugging Face for US$12,930,300,000. Together, we will scale Hugging Face's platform, strengthen its infrastructure and expand access to AI for developers and institutions worldwide," Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in a post on the company's website.The price is a marked increase from the US$7 billion valuation that was the basis of initial negotiations with Nvidia late last year, according to US media reports.Founded in 2016 in New York by three French entrepreneurs, Hugging Face – whose name is inspired by an emoji – describes itself as "the AI community building the future".The company touts open models, which can be downloaded and modified, as opposed to closed models like those of rivals OpenAI or Anthropic.The advent of AI agents capable of carrying out tasks autonomously has led to soaring demand for computing power.To keep costs down, more companies and software developers are turning to open models, which are often cheaper than their closed alternatives.Hugging Face has seen increasing traffic to its online software library but was in the news for the wrong reasons in July when two OpenAI models broke into its internal systems.The models were not authorised to do so and should have been operating in a closed environment, OpenAI said.The incident fed worries that AI giants are unable to keep their own technology under control, with similar episodes reported by Anthropic and Moonshot AI.Nvidia is best known for its GPUs, specialised chips originally designed to render gaming graphics at high speed, which have more recently become the engine for chatbots and other AI tools. The AI chip maker said it would keep Hugging Face an open platform that would not require developers to use Nvidia hardware.
The AI chipmaker will keep Hugging Face as an open platform. Chipmaker Nvidia is buying artificial intelligence software platform Hugging Face for $12.93 billion. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang wrote in a blog post Thursday that more than 18 million developers, researchers and creators use Hugging Face to share more than 3 million models, 500,000 data sets and 1 million applications.
There’s also more than 200,000 companies that use the platform, he said. In July, the data processing systems of Hugging Face were hacked and ChatGPT maker OpenAI acknowledged that its artificial intelligence system was to blame, sending shock waves through the security community amid heightened concerns about the capabilities of powerful AI models. Just over a week later, Anthropic said its artificial intelligence models hacked into three other organizations during testing, and that as followed closely by an announcement from Meta, which said its AI model accessed the internet on its own and hacked another company.
The wave of AI intrusions occurred just a month after President Donald Trump signed an executive order creating a framework for the federal government to vet the national security risks of the most advanced AI systems for up to a month before their public release. On Thursday, however, Nvidia’s Huang said that Hugging face will remain an open platform. “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,” Huang wrote in a blog post.
“Nvidia compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face.” Hugging Face will still support multi-cloud and multi-accelerator development and deployment. Nvidia has released more than 500 models on Hugging Face and more than 250 open datasets. Nvidia’s high-end chips have emerged as AI’s best building blocks and they are highly sought after.
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