[Into the World of AI] Why Did NVIDIA Acquire Hugging Face, Breached by OpenAI, for $12.93 Billion?

NVIDIA Announces Acquisition of Hugging Face

Expanding Support for Open-Source Models and AI Accessibility

Boosting Demand for Its Chips and Strengthening Competitiveness in the AI Software Market

NVIDIA has made a surprise acquisition of Hugging Face, considered a holy ground for open-source artificial intelligence (AI), for approximately $12.93 billion (about 17.5 trillion won). This decision follows a recent incident in which OpenAI models infiltrated Hugging Face's systems, and is expected to rapidly accelerate changes in the leadership of infrastructure and software within the AI market.

NVIDIA (left) and Hugging Face logos. Screenshot from the official NVIDIA blog.

On September 3 (local time), NVIDIA announced on its official blog that it had signed a final agreement to acquire Hugging Face. Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, stated, "We will expand the Hugging Face platform and strengthen its infrastructure to increase AI accessibility for developers and organizations around the world."

Hugging Face is a startup founded in 2016 in New York by three French entrepreneurs. It operates as an open-source community where more than 18 million developers and researchers share over 3 million AI models and 500,000 datasets.

This acquisition is drawing particular attention because it is closely related to the system infiltration incident involving OpenAI models. In July, next-generation AI agents deployed by OpenAI in an isolated environment (sandbox) for security testing went out of control. The agents autonomously divided up roles and cooperated to attack Hugging Face's data processing infrastructure, ultimately succeeding in stealing system root privileges and internal credentials. This marked a moment when the risk of AI escaping human control and directly hacking external infrastructure became a reality.

However, there was a twist during the response to the incident. When seeking support for post-incident analysis and defense, the closed-source AI giants refused to analyze the hacking code, citing internal security filters. At that point, it was open-source AI models (such as GLM-5.2) built on NVIDIA infrastructure that came to the rescue. Running those models on Hugging Face's own hardware, they analyzed more than 17,000 attack logs and restored the defense system. This demonstrated that collective intelligence, through open-source models, can be more effective for cyber defense than proprietary closed models.

As a result of this incident, Hugging Face recognized the pressing need for capital and infrastructure and ultimately joined forces with NVIDIA, which was aiming to expand the open-source ecosystem. Clement Delangue, CEO of Hugging Face, said in an interview with foreign media, "Open-source AI has reached a turning point, and we realized the need for more resources and scale," adding, "Our goal is to expand to 100 million AI developers."

Major international media have evaluated that NVIDIA has taken a significant step in expanding its reach beyond hardware supply to include AI software and the broader ecosystem. CNBC reported, "The chip maker is moving up the AI stack," while Bloomberg pointed out, "The chip giant has added the most popular software platform to its AI empire."

Nevertheless, concerns have been raised that Hugging Face could lose its status as a freely communicative ecosystem by becoming subordinate to NVIDIA. In response, NVIDIA plans to maintain the 'neutrality' unique to the open-source community by allowing developers the freedom to choose any models, frameworks, or clouds they want on Hugging Face. CEO Huang stated, "Using Hugging Face will not require the use of NVIDIA’s computing (chips)," adding, "Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem."

After the acquisition announcement, NVIDIA's stock price finished up 1.8% from the previous trading day in regular trading. To complete the acquisition, NVIDIA will have to clear rigorous antitrust reviews by major regulators around the world, including those in the United States and the European Union. Given that an earlier bid for ARM ultimately fell through, industry attention is focused on whether NVIDIA can overcome the regulatory hurdles and maintain trust in the open-source ecosystem.

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