Nvidia has acquired the artificial intelligence platform Hugging Face for $12.9 billion.
As BBC News reports, Nvidia will pay about $11.9 billion to Hugging Face investors and may offer up to $1 billion in stock-based incentives. Amazon, AMD, and Intel are also investors in the open-source AI platform.
Nvidia president and CEO Jensen Huang wrote in a blog post that Hugging Face will stay open-source, and developers will not have to use Nvidia technology.
Huang said the deal will help Nvidia grow and improve Hugging Face’s infrastructure for developers and organisations globally.
“Nvidia’s infrastructure, engineering and global reach can help improve platform reliability, safety, model evaluation, inference and deployment capabilities, while preserving the open ecosystem that made Hugging Face foundational.”
Hugging Face was founded in 2016 in New York City by French entrepreneurs Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf.
Delangue told CNBC that Hugging Face approached Nvidia because it “needed more resources, more scale, [and] more visibility.” He described Nvidia as “a perfect home” for the platform.
Nvidia is the biggest contributor to Hugging Face, having released over 500 models and more than 250 open datasets.
“I am honoured that [Clément Delangue] came to me as he considered the next chapter of Hugging Face and believed Nvidia would be a great home for the company, its community and the future of open models,” said Huang.
“We share this vision, and the Hugging Face team will now bring their passion and expertise to a much larger canvas, with their same iconic brand.”
“To the millions of builders on Hugging Face: thank you for pushing the boundaries of what is possible. We can’t wait to build the future together with you. Together, we will make AI more open, more capable and more accessible to people and institutions around the world.”