Nvidia has agreed to buy AI model platform Hugging Face for $13 billion, in the latest step by the $5.4 trillion chip giant to use its financial might to accelerate the technology’s boom while exerting greater control over the industry. Hugging Face, which only last year turned down a large investment from Nvidia at a $7 billion valuation to maintain its independence, serves as a repository for millions of models and data sets and has become a champion of “open” AI systems. Nvidia said the goal of the deal was to speed up the spread of open models.
Unlike proprietary models from labs such as OpenAI and Anthropic, the design of open-weight models is public and users can download, customize and run them on their own hardware. Nvidia, the world’s most valuable company, is the largest designer of the advanced chips used to train and run AI models. It has committed hundreds of billions of dollars in start-up investments, loan backstops, and financial guarantees in the name of expanding the ecosystem, thereby generating more demand for its products.
Thursday’s deal is the largest outright acquisition of a company by Nvidia, far eclipsing its $6.9 billion purchase of networking technology company Mellanox in 2020—a deal that laid the foundations for Nvidia’s move beyond chips into offering full data center infrastructure. Nvidia hopes to close the Hugging Face takeover by 2027, although the transaction is likely to face scrutiny from competition regulators. It will give Nvidia, which has developed its own family of models, control of one of the key distribution channels that influences how widely certain AI applications are adopted around the world.
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