Nvidia Is Buying Hugging Face For $13 Billion, Reports Say

Topline

Nvidia has reportedly agreed to purchase Hugging Face, the favored platform which hosts open-weight AI fashions, for $12.9 billion, The Data reported late on Wednesday, only a month after the chipmaker’s CEO Jensen Huang defended open fashions and urged towards “untimely restrictions.”

Nvidia has reportedly agreed to accumulate Hugging Face for round $13 billion.

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Key Info

The Data reported in regards to the deal, citing unnamed sources with data of the matter, and in a separate earlier report, Business Insider stated each side have been near a deal valuing Hugging Face at $13 billion.

If the deal goes by way of, it might be one in all Nvidia’s greatest acquisitions and it might come only a month after Hugging Face was thrust into the highlight after OpenAI reported one in all its fashions had breached its testing protocol and hacked the open-source AI platform.

Enterprise Insider reported that Hugging Face additionally beforehand held talks with Microsoft.

The purported $13 billion deal for Hugging Face can be a serious bounce from the $4.5 billion valuation it raised Sequence D funding at in August 2023.

Nvidia had participated in that funding spherical and poured $235 million into the open-weight AI fashions internet hosting platform.

What Has Nvidia Stated About Open Synthetic Intelligence Fashions?

Nvidia CEO and billionaire Jensen Huang made his first-ever post on X final month, popping out in protection of open-source AI fashions. He wrote: “Open fashions strengthen security and cybersecurity, speed up innovation and diffusion, and allow sovereignty. The world wants each frontier closed fashions and frontier open fashions.” Huang additionally shared a letter signed by a number of firms, together with Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta and a number of other others, which argued “Open weights…strengthen competitors and competitors is what retains the positive factors of AI broadly shared somewhat than concentrated in a number of palms.” Google and OpenAI would ultimately additionally signal the letters, making Anthropic probably the most high-profile absentee from the checklist amongst AI firms. Hugging Face was additionally a signatory of the letter, and its CEO Clement Delangue then told CNN: “Banning any open mannequin would damage first cyber safety defenders, startups, small firms, researchers and everybody who’s not a frontier lab.”

Tangent

Final month, OpenAI published a report disclosing that one in all its superior AI fashions, GPT-5.6 Sol, had hacked into Hugging Face’s servers throughout testing. The problem was attributed to the OpenAI mannequin exploiting a vulnerability that allowed it to flee its closed testing surroundings and entry the web. After breaching containment, the mannequin broke into Hugging Face’s system and carried out a cyberattack with out being ordered to take action. Hugging Face stated it tried to make use of a proprietary American AI mannequin to assist cease the assault, however it did not “distinguish an incident responder from an attacker.” The corporate stated it needed to rely as an alternative on the favored open-weight mannequin GLM 5.2, developed by China’s Z.ai lab, to deal with the breach. Hugging Face ran the Chinese language mannequin by itself infrastructure.