Nvidia 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. Hugging Face was founded in 2016 by French entrepreneurs Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf in New York City.
More than 18 million developers, researchers and creators use Hugging Face to share more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets and 1 million applications. More than 200,000 companies use the platform to discover, evaluate, customize and deploy AI, according to the company. Hugging Face will “remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem,” Huang said.
It will continue to support multi-cloud and multi-accelerator development and deployment, so builders can use the hardware and infrastructure that best fit their work,” Huang wrote. Huang recently coauthored an open letter on the importance of open weights to the AI economy. They enable organizations to match the right model to the right job.
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,” Huang said. According to Huang, Nvidia has released more than 500 models on Hugging Face and more than 250 open datasets. Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue told CNBC that his company approached Huang about a deal a few weeks ago.
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