Nvidia has agreed to buy Hugging Face, the New York-based developer platform, for $12.93bn (£9.57bn), in one of the chipmaker’s largest acquisitions to date.
The deal, announced on 3 September, gives Nvidia ownership of a widely used database of open AI models where developers collaborate, test and share tools.
Under the terms, Nvidia will pay about $11.9bn to Hugging Face’s investors and offer an equity-based retention programme of up to $1bn for employees who join Nvidia. Nvidia’s shares were slightly lower after the announcement.
Hugging Face was founded in 2016 by the French entrepreneurs Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf. Its backers include Intel, Advanced Micro Devices and Amazon. Beyond hosting AI models, it offers datasets, software libraries and cloud services used to build and deploy AI applications.
Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive, pledged that the platform would stay open after the purchase and that Nvidia’s chips would not be required to build on or deploy through it. “Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem,” he said in a post on Nvidia’s blog announcing the deal.
Support authors and subscribe to content
This is premium stuff. Subscribe to read the entire article.
