Nvidia in talks to acquire Hugging Face in $13 billion deal, Business Insider reports

JUST IN: Nvidia in talks to acquire AI platform Hugging Face in a $13 billion deal, according to Business Insider.

Nvidia might be buying Hugging Face for thirteen billion dollars.

Business Insider says the two are in talks, and if this closes, the biggest chipmaker on earth swallows the platform where basically the entire open source AI world lives. Hugging Face hosts over a million models, it's where researchers, startups and hobbyists share their work for free. Jensen Huang already sells the shovels to every gold miner in this rush, and you can see him here. Now he'd own the town square too.

And that's what makes people nervous. Hugging Face built its whole reputation on being neutral ground, the Switzerland of AI. Being owned by the company whose chips everyone depends on is a strange kind of neutral. Meta, Google, OpenAI, they all publish models there. Would they keep doing that inside Nvidia's house?

Thirteen billion for the place everyone else's AI lives. That's not a purchase, that's leverage.

This is Sara White, reporting for HIT.