Jensen Huang said developers will retain the ability to choose models, clouds and computing platforms without requiring Nvidia hardware.
Nvidia has acquired Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, the chipmaker said, taking ownership of an AI platform for sharing models, applications and datasets.
Nvidia said Hugging Face hosts three million models, one million applications used by more than 18 million developers and 500,000 datasets. Developers use the platform to find, build and deploy AI models and related tools.
Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive, said Hugging Face would continue to support open-source and open-weight models and expand developer access. “Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem,” Huang said. He said developers would be able to choose their models, frameworks, cloud and inference providers, and computing platforms, without being required to use Nvidia compute.
Hugging Face was founded in 2016 and has raised more than $395 million, according to Crunchbase data. Its last reported funding round was a $235 million investment in 2023 led by Salesforce Ventures, with Google, Amazon, IBM and Nvidia among the investors. Annualized revenue has been reported at $150 million.
Clem Delangue, Hugging Face’s chief executive, said the company needed more compute, support, collaboration and visibility to operate at a larger scale. Nvidia said it has released more than 500 models and 250 open datasets on Hugging Face.
