chip manufacturer Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) buys an artificial intelligence software platform Hugging face for 13 billion dollars.
It’s the latest deal from the company, whose processors are a key part of the AI boom, and underscores Nvidia’s push to champion increasingly popular open-source AI models.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang wrote in one Blog post Thursday that 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 also use the platform, he said.
In July, Hugging Face’s data processing systems were hacked and ChatGPT maker OpenAI admitted that its artificial intelligence system was responsible, sending shockwaves through the security community as concerns grew about the capabilities of powerful AI models.
A little over a week later, Anthropic announced that its artificial intelligence models had hacked three other organizations during testing. This was quickly followed by an announcement from Meta saying its AI model had accessed the internet on its own and hacked another company.
The wave of AI interventions came just a month after President Donald Trump signed an executive order creating a framework for the federal government to review the national security risks of the most advanced AI systems up to a month before their release.
However, on Thursday, Nvidia’s Huang said that Hugging Face would remain an open platform. He suggested that Nvidia is betting that more companies will turn to open-source AI, which allows them to download and customize their own AI models rather than paying for proprietary AI services from companies like OpenAI and Anthropic.
Open models allow startups, corporations, universities and public institutions to build on advanced capabilities without having to train each model from scratch,” Huang wrote in a blog post. “They allow organizations to match the right model to the right job.”
Hugging Face continues to support the development and deployment of multicloud and multi-accelerators.
Nvidia has published more than 500 models and more than 250 open datasets on Hugging Face.
“Nvidia’s investment in Hugging Face is a strong strategic hedge against the diverging capabilities of AI,” said Bret Greenstein, chief AI officer at global business and technology consulting firm West Monroe, in an emailed statement. “With much of Nvidia’s valuation tied to the adoption and expansion of AI over the next decade, the company has a clear interest in supporting the success of the entire ecosystem.”
Nvidia’s high-end chips have become the leading building blocks for AI and are in high demand. The Santa Clara, California-based company reported quarterly profit of $59.69 billion at the end of last month.
While AI has fueled stock market gains and U.S. economic growth in recent years, skepticism is growing about whether AI will justify the trillions of dollars being spent on developing the technology.
The AI industry is also facing increasing resistance amid objections to data center expansion and fears that the rapid pace of AI adoption could lead to widespread job losses around the world.
The $12.93 billion deal includes $1 billion for a retention plan for Hugging Face employees, Huang told CNBC.
Shares of Nvidia rose nearly 2% in morning trading. Hugging Face is not publicly traded.
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