Nvidia to buy Hugging Face for $12.93 billion in major AI expansion

BREAKING: Nvidia to buy AI developer platform Hugging Face for $12.93 billion in a major expansion of its open-source AI reach.

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

That's the platform where developers go to find open-source AI models, the free ones you can download and customise, and it's now owned by the chip giant everyone in AI already pays. Jensen Huang, that's him here, says Hugging Face stays an open platform and developers can keep choosing their own models, chips and clouds.

Sure. But look at the shape of this. Nvidia is sitting on a cash pile of more than twenty two billion, its biggest customers, Meta, OpenAI, Microsoft, are all building their own chips to escape it, and now it owns the front door where millions of developers shop. One startup boss put it plainly, any rational company would tilt that platform towards its own hardware.

A five point four trillion dollar company just bought the neutral ground. Whether it stays neutral is the whole question.

This is Liu Yang, reporting for HIT.