After weeks of swirling rumors, Nvidia confirmed in the present day that it has acquired Hugging Face for $12.93 billion. Hugging Face’s platform hosts three million fashions, a million purposes utilized by over 18 million builders, and half one million datasets.
In a blog post, Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang stated that Hugging Face will proceed to help open-source and open-weight fashions and can work on increasing developer entry.
“Hugging Face will stay an open platform for the whole AI ecosystem. Builders will select the fashions they need, the frameworks they need, the clouds and inference service suppliers they need and the computing platforms they need. Nvidia compute won’t be required to construct on or deploy via Hugging Face,” stated Huang.
Huang touted Nvidia’s contributions and stated that the chip firm has launched greater than 500 fashions and 250 open datasets on Hugging Face. He argued that the corporate builds open fashions to get builders internationally to make use of them.
For an organization like Nvidia, which is a dominant {hardware} platform for AI improvement and inference, an open ecosystem that it controls is useful as it will possibly create a platform suited to its chips. Plus, as TechCrunch wrote earlier, Nvidia will have the ability to sell its unused capacity to enterprise prospects packaged with Hugging Face’s providing.
Hugging Face was based in 2016 and has raised over $395 million in funding to this point, in line with Crunchbase. The corporate’s final spherical was in 2023, when it raised $235 million led by Salesforce Ventures, with investments from Google, Amazon, IBM, and Nvidia.
In a post on X, Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue thanked the group for displaying the corporate could possibly be an alternative choice to closed-source APIs.
“However for it to occur at [a] bigger scale, it wants extra compute, extra help, extra collaboration, and extra visibility. That’s why we went to speak to Jensen, who provided to do precisely that with us,” stated Delangue.
Hugging Face has risen in prominence, with extra fashions being launched each day. Final yr, the corporate rejected a $500 million deal from Nvidia, in line with the Financial Times. Final month, The Information reported that Hugging Face is clocking $150 million in annualized income.
In an interview with TechCrunch in July, Delangue stated that its growth rate is helping the platform to get “close to profitability.”
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