Nvidia has agreed to buy AI model platform Hugging Face for $13 billion, in the latest step by the $5.4 trillion chip giant to use its financial might to accelerate the technology’s boom while exerting greater control over the industry.
Hugging Face, which only last year turned down a large investment from Nvidia at a $7 billion valuation to maintain its independence, serves as a repository for millions of models and data sets and has become a champion of “open” AI systems.
Nvidia said the goal of the deal was to speed up the spread of open models. Unlike proprietary models from labs such as OpenAI and Anthropic, the design of open-weight models is public and users can download, customize and run them on their own hardware.