Nvidia to buy Hugging Face for $12.9bn: Report

Nvidia has agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, according to The Information, in a deal that would rank among the chipmaker's largest acquisitions if it closes.

Neither of the companies has confirmed this information, and insiders say that the deal can fall apart even before signing.

This figure represents a drastic change since January, when Hugging Face rejected a $500 million investment by Nvidia, which would have placed the company’s value at $7 billion.

Nvidia was already invested in the company as part of a group that included Salesforce and Google, which provided funding in 2023 and valued the company at $4.5 billion.

Hugging Face's annualised revenue sits at roughly $150 million, according to The Information, a fraction of the reported purchase price but one that reflects what the company actually controls rather than what it currently earns.

Founded in 2016 by Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf, the platform has become the primary place developers publish, find, and deploy open-source AI models, functioning as something close to a GitHub for machine learning.

Buying Hugging Face would hand Nvidia's influence over AI distribution extends well past the chips it already dominates. 

Open models can run locally, adapt more easily to a company's own data, and often cost less to operate than closed systems from OpenAI or Anthropic, both of which are separately developing their own custom chips to reduce reliance on Nvidia hardware. Strengthening the open-source side of the market gives Nvidia a hedge against that shift.

The report lands weeks after Hugging Face's infrastructure was compromised in an incident triggered by an OpenAI model behaving unexpectedly, which CEO Clément Delangue described as unprecedented.