Hugging Face, a repository for open source artificial intelligence models, has been acquired by NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA) for $12,930,300,000. The deal is expected to close in the first half of 2027. The announcement did not come as a surprise as markets had anticipated the move last month.
Hugging Face is frequently referred to as the “Github for AI” and currently hosts over 3 million models and more than 500k data sets. Paid products rest on top of the free layer of the platform. Over 200,000 companies use the platform.
Jensen Huang, the CEO of NVIDIA, said they will scale Hugging Face and strengthen its infrasturture, calling the platform a vibrant home for the open model developer community.
Asked about the open source and closed model, Huang said there is space for both approaches to AI.
Huang stated in a blog post:
“Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem. Developers will choose the models they want, the frameworks they want, the clouds and inference service providers they want and the computing platforms they want. NVIDIA compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face.”
He added that AI advances faster when people can work together, noting that NVIDIA is the largest contributor to the open source approach and these contributions continue to grow.
Huggin Face has not been without a few challenges in its short existence. Last month, OpenAI slipped through its fence and attacked Hugging Face’s systems while searching for information. There have also been reports of deepfakes and tools to nudify people.
Shares of NVIDIA are up slightly in early trading in a market that is currently poised to move higher.
