Nvidia in Talks to Buy Hugging Face for $13 Billion

In recent weeks, Nvidia has been in talks to acquire Hugging Face — the platform around which an ecosystem of open AI models has grown up. That's according to Business Insider, citing a source in the know. The valuation under discussion exceeds 13 billion dollars, which would make the deal one of the largest in the chipmaker's history.

The two sides have yet to reach an agreement, and the talks could still fall through. Nvidia and Hugging Face declined to comment. Microsoft had also shown interest in Hugging Face, but its negotiations, according to sources, are no longer under way.

Nvidia's Growing Appetite

Nvidia is spending its formidable cash reserves ever more aggressively. By the company's own account, it has set aside 18 billion dollars for equity investments through the end of the fiscal year — on top of the 47.9 billion already placed in private companies.

The chipmaker's relationship with Hugging Face goes back a long way: Nvidia took part in a 235-million-dollar round in 2023, when the startup was valued at 4.5 billion. Yet late last year Hugging Face turned down Nvidia's offer to invest 500 million at a 7-billion valuation — as the Financial Times reported, the company did not want a dominant investor capable of swaying its decisions.

The Price of Neutrality

Hugging Face, founded in 2016 by French entrepreneurs Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf, hosts millions of models and datasets on which developers build their projects. Owning the platform would give Nvidia direct access to this community and could, perhaps, steer more compute workloads toward its chips.

But this is precisely where the tension lies. Hugging Face's strength is its neutrality: the platform supports models and hardware from across the market, including Nvidia's direct rivals such as AMD and Intel. Coming under the control of one of the players could cast doubt on that impartiality.

Source: Hacker News