THE WASHINGTON POST: Nvidia buys AI platform Hugging Face for $US13 billion

Nvidia Corp. has agreed to acquire artificial intelligence startup Hugging Face in a transaction valued at about $US13 billion ($18b).

The price includes an up to $US1 billion equity-based retention program for Hugging Face employees that join Nvidia.

The chipmaker giant said it will keep Hugging Face’s platform open and consistent with the startup’s existing practices.

“Under this commitment, Hugging Face would continue to permit model makers, developers, and users to upload and download models and datasets of their choosing and to support other silicon vendors,” according to a statement. Bloomberg News reported earlier that Nvidia was set to reach an agreement as soon as this week.

Buying Hugging Face is the biggest move yet in Nvidia Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang’s push to broaden the uptake of AI and extend his customer list. The deal gives Nvidia control of one of the key platforms where developers showcase and share AI models.

Huang is committed to helping foster so-called open source models to prevent the technology of a few large companies from dominating AI. Some of those companies are currently Nvidia’s biggest customers but are forging ahead with their own chip projects.

“Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty,” Huang said in a post on X. “Nvidia is going to be a great home for Hugging Face, its community and the future of open models.”

Nvidia was already a backer of Hugging Face, alongside Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Amazon.com Inc., Intel Corp. and Salesforce Inc., among others.

Founded in 2016, Hugging Face operates a platform for sharing AI models that can be used freely by others. The startup was valued at $US4.5 billion in a funding round three years ago. Nvidia’s talks with the company were reported earlier by Business Insider.

Hugging Face was at the centre of a cybersecurity incident in which a model being tested by OpenAI inadvertently hacked the platform. The breach raised alarms about the safety of cutting-edge AI technology. OpenAI has said it could have reacted sooner to prevent the attack on Hugging Face’s systems.

The acquisition of Hugging Face adds to a list of deals struck by Nvidia in the past year, including a $US6 billion licensing agreement in August with startup Poolside that included extending job offers to many of that company’s employees. Nvidia also paid about $US20 billion for most of the chip startup Groq.

Nvidia, the world’s most valuable company, is the leading maker of AI accelerators, the chips that help train and operate models. It has gradually added a variety of other technologies, including software, with the goal of expanding the AI economy.

The Santa Clara, California-based company gave a surprisingly strong sales forecast for fiscal 2028 last week, saying revenue would grow about 70 per cent.

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