Nvidia Acquires Hugging Face for $13 Billion, Expanding Its Influence in the AI Ecosystem

Nvidia is set to acquire Hugging Face, an open-source artificial intelligence (AI) platform company. With this acquisition, Nvidia is anticipated to accelerate its strategy of expanding open-weight AI models and services, positioning itself against the United States' closed model approach and China's open model policy.

Reuters Yonhap News

On September 3 (local time), Nvidia announced that it had agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.9303 billion (approximately KRW 17.5 trillion). The deal includes up to $1 billion in stock compensation for Hugging Face employees who will join Nvidia.

Hugging Face is a platform that hosts more than 3 million AI models and has about 18 million users. It has functioned as a hub for the open-weight AI ecosystem. Nvidia emphasized that this acquisition will help protect the open-source AI developer ecosystem, which fosters the sharing of software and data freely accessible to everyone through Hugging Face.

Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, stated he intends to maintain Hugging Face as an open platform. He remarked, "Open-weight broadens accessibility to AI and helps distribute AI leadership across companies, institutions, and communities."

However, Bloomberg pointed out that there are concerns within the AI industry that Nvidia’s influence might become too concentrated as a result of this acquisition. Since Nvidia is already the largest company in the sector, acquiring Hugging Face could further increase its power over the overall AI ecosystem. Previously, Nvidia's attempt to acquire Arm was blocked by regulators due to concerns about excessive market dominance.

In particular, Nvidia has recently pursued a series of major investments. In August, the company entered into a $6 billion software licensing agreement with AI startup Poolside, offering jobs to its staff. It is also reported to have spent about $20 billion to acquire semiconductor startup Groq.

Jeff Pollard, an analyst at Forrester Research, explained, "Through this acquisition, Nvidia is coming even closer to dominating the entire AI supply chain, spanning compute power, AI models, datasets, and developer workflows." He added, "This creates opportunities to strengthen AI security, but at the same time, Nvidia's influence could become further concentrated in key areas of the open AI ecosystem."

Meanwhile, according to Bloomberg, with this sale, the three Hugging Face co-founders—CEO Clement Delangue, CTO Julien Chaumond, and CSO Thomas Wolf—are each expected to become billionaires, with assets of about $1.8 billion apiece.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.