- Nvidia’s $12.9B Hugging Face acquisition puts one of AI’s most important open-source platforms under the control of the world’s dominant AI infrastructure provider
- Nvidia is promising more support for reliability, safety, evaluation, inference and deployment
- Analysts are watching whether Nvidia can preserve Hugging Face’s open ecosystem
It’s official: Nvidia is acquiring open-source AI platform Hugging Face for $12.9 billion in a deal it said will help expand access to AI for developers and organizations worldwide.
“AI advances faster when people can build together,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in a post announcing the deal. “Open models let startups, businesses, universities and public institutions build on advanced capabilities without training every model from scratch…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.”
Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue on a call with press outlined a goal to increase the platform's reach from 18 million users to 100 million over the coming years and said the tie-up with Nvidia will give it "more chances to get there faster."
He added with Nvidia's support, Hugging Face can "think about the next 10 years and really optimize for maximum impact in the community and in the field."
Asked on the press call about whether the pair are concerned about anti-trust scrutiny of the deal, Delangue argued the acquisiton will redistribute power in the AI ecosystem rather than concentrating it. Today, he said significant power and control is concentrated in the hands of proprietary APIs. Putting Nvidia's muscle behind Hugging Face's open source ecosystem "allows for some healthy competition."
"This is a much needed thing in the world," Delangue said. "We think this operation, this announcement will allow AI to be more distributed all over the world and to avoid too much concentration of power."
Questions about the Nvidia and Hugging Face deal
Rumors of the deal swirled last week, leaving analysts spilt about whether the tie-up would be a good thing for the open-source AI community.
While several analysts noted the deal gives Nvidia control over a key AI distribution channel and could help provide more resources and support to the open-source community, David Linthicum, Founder of Linthicum Research, worried the cultural DNA of the two companies would be too different.
Moor Insights and Strategy VP Jason Andersen also wondered how Nvidia would create a business model for third party AI models and data sets.
But Huang noted in the deal announcement that Nvidia is already the “largest contributor of open models and data to Hugging Face,” having released more than 500 models and over 250 open datasets.
“Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem,” Huang wrote. “NVIDIA’s infrastructure, engineering and global reach can help improve platform reliability, safety, model evaluation, inference and deployment capabilities, while preserving the open ecosystem that made Hugging Face foundational.”
Asked about Nvidia's stance on continuing Hugging Face's hardware neutrality, Nvidia VP of Enterprise AI Justin Boitano said on the call the path to expanding Hugging Face's developer community relies on trust and providing the freedom for them to run their models anywhere they want.
"So we are incentivized and motivated to keep this open and neutral and ensure that developers can work wherever they want to work," he said.
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