Chipmaker Nvidia is buying artificial intelligence software platform Hugging Face for $13 billion.
It’s the latest deal by the company, whose processors are integral to the AI boom, and highlights Nvidia's push to champion increasingly popular open-source AI models.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang wrote in a blog post Thursday that more than 18 million developers, researchers and creators use Hugging Face to share more than 3 million models, 500,000 data sets and 1 million applications. More than 200,000 companies also that use the platform, he said.
In July, Hugging Face's data processing systems were hacked, and ChatGPT maker OpenAI acknowledged that its artificial intelligence system was to blame, sending shock waves through the security community amid heightened concerns about the capabilities of powerful AI models.
Just over a week later, Anthropic said its artificial intelligence models hacked into three other organizations during testing. That was followed closely by an announcement from Meta, which said its AI model accessed the internet on its own and hacked another company.
The wave of AI intrusions occurred just a month after President Donald Trump signed an executive order creating a framework for the federal government to vet the national security risks of the most advanced AI systems for up to a month before their public release.
On Thursday, however, Nvidia's Huang said that Hugging face will remain an open platform. He signaled that Nvidia is betting that more businesses will turn to open-source AI, which lets them download and customize their own AI models, rather than pay for proprietary AI services from companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic.
Open models let startups, businesses, universities and public institutions build on advanced capabilities without training every model from scratch," Huang wrote in a blog post. "They enable organizations to match the right model to the right job.
Hugging Face will still support multicloud and multi-accelerator development and deployment.
Nvidia has released more than 500 models and more than 250 open data sets on Hugging Face.
“Nvidia’s investment in Hugging Face is a strong strategic hedge against the different ways AI could evolve,” Bret Greenstein, chief AI officer at global business and technology consulting firm West Monroe, said in an emailed statement. “With much of Nvidia’s valuation tied to the adoption and expansion of AI over the next decade, the company has a clear interest in supporting the entire ecosystem’s success.”
Nvidia's high-end chips have emerged as the leading building blocks for AI, and are highly sought after. The Santa Clara, California-based company reported quarterly profits of $59.69 billion late last month.
While AI has powered stock market gains and U.S. economic growth in recent years, there’s been growing skepticism about whether AI will justify the trillions of dollars being spent to develop the technology.
The AI industry is also faces increasing pushback amid objections to the expansion of data centers and fears that the rapid speed of AI adoption could lead to widespread job losses worldwide.
The $12.93 billion deal includes $1 billion for a retention plan for Hugging Face employees, Huang told CNBC.
Nvidia's shares rose nearly 2% in morning trading. Hugging Face is not publicly traded.
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AP Business Writer Kelvin Chan contributed to this report.
