Nvidia confirms it will buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion

BREAKING: Nvidia confirms it will buy AI platform Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, gaining a hub of over 3 million models used by more than 18 million developers.

Nvidia just bought Hugging Face for twelve point nine billion dollars.

That's the home of open source AI, three million models, eighteen million developers, now owned by the company that sells the chips they all run on. Jensen Huang, and you can see him here, promises nothing changes. Developers pick their own models, their own clouds, and Nvidia compute won't be required. Sure. The landlord always says the rent stays the same.

Here's the detail I love. Last year Hugging Face turned down five hundred million from the very same buyer. Twelve months later they got twenty five times that. CEO Clem Delangue says he went to Jensen asking for more compute and more support, and walked out with a twelve point nine billion dollar hug.

The punchline writes itself. The platform built as the alternative to closed AI giants now belongs to the biggest AI giant of them all.

This is Sara White, reporting for HIT.