Nvidia in talks to acquire Hugging Face for over $13 billion
Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
Nvidia is in advanced talks to acquire Hugging Face, the leading platform for open-source AI models, in a deal that could value the company at more than $13 billion. The acquisition would give Nvidia a major foothold with developers and potentially drive more workloads onto its chips, but could also threaten Hugging Face's neutrality, as it supports hardware from rivals like AMD and Intel. Talks are ongoing and could still fall apart.
Owning the platform could give Nvidia a bigger foothold with those developers — and potentially drive more workloads onto its chips.
- SillyUsername
This isn't a good thing for open source.
Nvidia don't share CUDA, don't open source their drivers, don't support capable but older hardware (forget Pascal etc), and generally charge a premium over competitors for hardware.
This acquisition will likely solidify this general stance, reduce free compute allowance for a subscription, cap downloads, push advertising, generally favour models that are Nvidia prescribed or have been sponsored, and potentially ban models and datasets that are deemed risky legally (abliterated etc).
I see no other reason why Nvidia would want this kind of vertical.
- GeertB
Nvidia's been pretty terrible for open source / free software. No need to quote Linus Torvalds here. They want to control what runs on their hardware. They want to you write code against their proprietary drivers and APIs, not directly against the hardware (which these days of course also contains plenty of software, but still).
Don't expect things to go differently this time around. Nvidia wants control over the software stack. Acquiring HF fits in perfectly. The play is long term.
- code51
Also consider:
Nvidia is investing $1 billion in Poolside and paying $6 billion to license its technology and hire most of its engineers.
They are the elephant in the room, with their CDS sky-high. Sounds like they are opinionated on the whole AI thing, trying to drive this with open-source models, countering OpenAI using Jalapeno.
Looks zero-sum for the players.
All the while Google silently planning to get milk from all layers.
- fsuts
AI companies seeking to release their own chips and Apple Metal and other unified memory solutions will all eat into Nvidias high margin GPU sales.
This can only be bad news, Nvidia didn’t buy hugging face to be good custodians but for business reasons.
Let’s hope an alternative platform emerges and takes off.
- manlymuppet
Potentially horrible for monopoly reasons, but if other big acquisitions in the AI era teach us anything, developers are about to get a whole lot of free and discounted trial credits.
That’s at least a plus. I will happily burn through as much VC money as they will give me to tinker with my projects.
- matesz
Forgive me for newb question, but why Hugging Face is a thing at all? Couldn't models be simply distributed via torrents? And the whole aggregator thing would come down to indexing magent links published by model providers?
- binarymax
Well congrats to Clem and the team. I remember when huggingface was doing things like coreference resolution models on spacy.
I hope nvidia does right by the community.
Edit to add: $13B should cover the S3 egress fees for a couple months :D
- esjeon
Obviously, NVIDIA is trying to own the AI development chain.
Owning HF -- the discovery and distribution channel -- is one thing, but I think the biggest threat vector is the privileged access to HF platform data, that includes HW survey info and model download pattern. This can be a borderline anti-trust case.
- londons_explore
I don't understand the CUDA lockin in 2026...
Surely anyone can take any piece of CUDA code and tell some LLM to port it to another platform and keep grinding till performance is identical?
- funlang
NVIDIA buying HF feels like defensive move. They don't want open models become hardware agnostic. I bet we see more 'optimized for CUDA' push in one year.