Nvidia buys Hugging Face for $12.9 billion — this is many times the startup's revenue
Nvidia has agreed to acquire Hugging Face, one of the largest hubs for open AI models, datasets, libraries, and a developer community, for $12.9 billion.
Nvidia has agreed to acquire Hugging Face, one of the largest hubs for open AI models, datasets, libraries, and a developer community, for $12.9 billion.
This is reported by The Information, citing its own sources.
The purchase could be one of the biggest deals in Nvidia's history under Jensen Huang, and it confirms the company's bet that demand for AI technology is continuing to grow, rather than peaking.
Gaining control of Hugging Face would give Nvidia an important advantage at a time when closed-model developers (including OpenAI and Anthropic) are trying to create their own processors to reduce their dependence on Nvidia graphics chips.
At the same time, the amount of the deal significantly exceeds the financial performance of the startup itself - it was previously reported that Hugging Face's annual revenue is about $150 million, writes Reuters.
Representatives of Nvidia and the New York startup Hugging Face have so far refrained from official comments.
Nvidia was already among Hugging Face's investors — in 2023, it participated in a $235 million funding round, along with Google and Salesforce, when the startup was valued at $4.5 billion. Since then, the chipmaker has invested billions of dollars in building the entire AI ecosystem.
In January, the Financial Times reported that last year Hugging Face rejected Nvidia's $500 million investment offer at a company valuation of $7 billion.
Along with the news of the deal, Nvidia is forecasting a 70% jump in revenue in the next fiscal year and noting that it has reserved $18 billion for direct investments through fiscal 2027.
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