NVIDIA confirms Hugging Face acquisition at $12,930,300,000
The home of open models changes hands. In the announcement, Jensen Huang wrote that the platform will stay open and that NVIDIA hardware will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face.
NVIDIA has officially confirmed that it has agreed to acquire Hugging Face, the main home of open AI models. The deal, reported second hand a day earlier at a rounded $12.9 billion, is now confirmed on the company's own blog, signed by founder and CEO Jensen Huang, with the exact figure: $12,930,300,000. The announcement is dated 3 September.
Hugging Face is the largest gathering point for open weight models. By the figures Huang gave, more than 18 million developers, researchers and creators use the platform; it holds more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets and 1 million applications. More than 200,000 companies use it to discover, evaluate, customize and deploy AI.
The critical part of the announcement is the set of commitments about how the platform will work from here. Huang wrote that Hugging Face "will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem" and stated plainly: "NVIDIA compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face." Developers, he wrote, will keep choosing the models, frameworks, clouds, inference service providers and computing platforms they want.
The post also says the platform will continue to support open source and open weight models from across the ecosystem, from every model builder, and will keep supporting multi-cloud and multi-accelerator development and deployment, so builders can use the hardware and infrastructure that best fit their work.
Huang noted that NVIDIA is the largest contributor of open models and data to Hugging Face, with more than 500 models and more than 250 open datasets released there. He also recalled recently coauthoring an open letter on the importance of open weights to the AI economy, whose argument was that open weights broaden access to AI and help keep leadership distributed across companies, institutions and communities.
There is a detail on how the sale began. Huang wrote that Hugging Face cofounder and CEO Clément Delangue came to him as he considered the next chapter of the company, believing NVIDIA would be a good home for the company, its community and the future of open models. The team keeps its own brand.
The announcement carries no information on regulatory approvals or an expected closing date.
A second major step on the open model side landed the same day. The Abu Dhabi based Institute of Foundation Models announced K2 Horizon, a fleet of six models shipped together with their weights, code, training data and methodology. In a week where the open weights debate has been busy, the warehouse where open models are kept has changed owner.
