Nvidia is buying Hugging Face for almost $13 billion — SkimNews
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- Nvidia agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, bringing one of the most popular open-source AI model and dataset hosting platforms under the world's biggest AI chipmaker.
- Hugging Face, founded in 2016 and often called "GitHub for AI," was last valued at $4.5 billion in a 2023 funding round Nvidia itself participated in.
- Hugging Face turned down a $500 million Nvidia investment offer last year that would have valued it at $7 billion, citing concerns over having a single dominant investor.
- Hugging Face pulls in only around $150 million in annualized revenue (per The Information) — a small fraction of its purchase price.
- Jensen Huang pledged Hugging Face will remain an open platform, with developers free to choose any models, frameworks, clouds, or compute — "Nvidia compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face."
- The deal gives Nvidia a strategic foothold to preserve its AI hardware dominance as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google race to build their own chips.
- Acquisition speculation began August 23 when Business Insider reported Hugging Face was working with a bank on a $13 billion sale; The Information first reported the $12.9 billion agreement was in place.
Why it matters: Hugging Face generates only about $150 million in annualized revenue, making this a strategic, not financial, bet — Nvidia is paying nearly triple the platform's 2023 private valuation of $4.5 billion to lock in influence over the open-source AI ecosystem as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google race to build their own chips. The price tag lands just over a year after Hugging Face rejected a smaller Nvidia investment, with founders citing exactly the concentration risk this deal now formalizes.
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