San Francisco: Nvidia has agreed to acquire artificial intelligence platform Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, marking one of the largest deals in the AI sector.Announcing the acquisition on Thursday, Nvidia founder and Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang said Hugging Face has become a major hub for the global AI community, with more than 18 million developers, researchers and creators using the platform.According to Huang, Hugging Face hosts more than 3 million AI models, 500,000 datasets and 1 million applications. More than 200,000 companies also use the platform.Nvidia said Hugging Face will continue operating as an open platform serving the broader 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,” Huang said in a blog post.“Nvidia compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face.”The company added that Hugging Face will continue supporting open-source and open-weight AI models, as well as multi-cloud and multi-accelerator development and deployment.The acquisition further strengthens Nvidia's position in the rapidly expanding artificial intelligence market, combining its leadership in AI computing with one of the industry's largest repositories of AI models, datasets and applications.
