Nvidia reportedly reaches $12.9 billion deal to acquire Hugging Face
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| Credit: Mashable edit: Samuel Boivin / NurPhoto via Getty Images; Andrey Rudakov / Bloomberg via Getty Images |
Nvidia has reportedly struck a deal to buy open-source AI company Hugging Face for $12.9 billion. If it goes through, the chipmaker could soon be steward to a millions-strong community of AI developers.
SEE ALSO:Nvidia resurrects older graphics cards as RAM demands impact tech prices
Founded in 2016, Hugging Face originated as a chatbot app for teenagers before shifting its focus to machine learning. It now maintains a large repository of open-source AI models, datasets, and tools contributed by users, stating that it is "on a mission to democratize good machine learning" (emphasis original). According to Hugging Face, its platform had 13 million users and over 500,000 public datasets last year, and hosts over 3 million models as of last week.
Now, The Information reports that Hugging Face has reached an agreement to sell to Nvidia, citing sources close to the matter. This partially corroborated a weekend report from Business Insider that Hugging Face was considering an acquisition valued at around $13 billion.
Hugging Face previously rejected Nvidia's $500 million investment offer
This isn't the first time Nvidia has expressed interest in Hugging Face. The chipmaker previously invested in Hugging Face's Series D funding round in 2023, contributing to the $235 million raised from companies such as Google, Amazon, and Salesforce. At the time, Hugging Face was valued at $4.5 billion.
According to a Financial Times report, Nvidia subsequently made a $500 million investment offer to Hugging Face late last year, but it was rejected. Though Hugging Face did not comment specifically on Nvidia's proposal at the time, it reportedly said it didn't want a single dominant investor that might sway decisions. The deal would have valued Hugging Face at $7 billion.
Hugging Face cofounder Thomas Wolf declined to comment on the rumored sale to Nvidia during a Thursday interview with Bloomberg Tech. However, when asked whether he or fellow co-founders Clément Delangue and Julien Chaumond are considering selling more broadly, Wolf stated that Hugging Face has "always had a lot of interest."
Mashable has reached out to Nvidia and Hugging Face for comment.
Hugging Face users react with both wariness and nonchalance
Users of the Hugging Face platform have reacted to the news of Nvidia's potential takeover with a mix of wariness and detachment. Some have said the deal "screams monopoly," expressing concern that Nvidia could censor the repository, or use it to exert control over developers and snuff out competition.
"It isn't about a 'return on investment' in the traditional sense, but about control," Reddit user r/4gotmipwd said about the acquisition. "They're paying for the power to use it as a weapon against others, or destroy it if it threatens their position."
Others believe Nvidia won't make such significant changes, as it would make HuggingFace less competitive. If Nvidia does go that route, users can simply jump ship to another platform.
"I'm not too worried as long as USA users can access [Chinese competitor] ModelScope," wrote r/DistanceSolar1449. "I don’t see Nvidia deleting a model from [Hugging Face] as long as ModelScope exists."
"Nvidia has a vested interest in open source AI models," said r/CommanderKoba. "The profit motive behind their company incentivizes a free, open platform for the exchange of these models, because they sell the hardware."
"Nvidia's whole strategy right now is pumping open source models so that private labs are commoditized, meanwhile there are dozens of inference providers all buying Nvidia to serve tokens," r/jebuizy wrote. "Will it work? Who knows, but their incentives are definitely aligned with bolstering open source models right now."
Nvidia's Q2 2027 results show benefits from AI boom's impact still increasing
Nvidia did not mention Hugging Face when releasing its Q2 results for the 2027 financial year on Wednesday. However, the chipmaker announced that it had hauled in $96.2 billion in revenue in just three months, an 18 percent increase over Q1's $81.6 billion. This, in turn, was a 20 percent increase over the previous quarter, as Nvidia continues to profit from increased demand driven by the AI boom.
It isn't expecting this to fall off any time soon, either, with Nvidia continuing to grow even after the U.S. government policies cut it off from the significant Chinese market.
"Last year, one of the funnest things to do is just to go figure out where I go for dinner and who I have dinner with, and their stock price doubles the next day," NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang said during this week's earnings call.
Hugging Face is a privately held company, so it does not have public shares. However, Nvidia's own stock did jump significantly in the wake of this week's news, surging 8.74 percent by the end of trading on Thursday.
Topics Nvidia
Model distribution has become infrastructure.
ReplyDelete$300
ReplyDeletelol it's already topped my dude remember don't fall in love with assets make money going up an down
DeleteThis a disguised CIRCULAR INVESTMENT. There are other tools out there that do the same thing. Look it up yourself.
ReplyDeleteKeep the bubble going!
Nope
ReplyDeleteFlood the zone marketing scheme from AI geeks is so tiresome.
ReplyDeletethe circular money exchange continues to grow.
ReplyDeleteTo be fair this is less about circular money and more about good old fashioned anti competitive practices
Deletecan it not be both? :) #merica
DeleteAt this point it’s global.
DeleteI wonder if we’ll be dealing with these same problems when our scale has reached multi-planetary or galactic.
I guess that’s if humanity doesn’t delete itself prior to that.
There’s an if? I thought it was when.
Deleteone is a saas company and the other is a hardware company
Deletehow is it anti competitive?
HF isn’t really SaaS. It’s a model repository and software vendor.
DeleteHF is basically the de facto repository for AI models. It also created and maintains some key software (llama.cpp and gradio among others). The standard for model files is a format called safetensors (which HF also created)
Until recently the standard for running models was via CUDA on Nvidia chips only (CUDA is proprietary Nvidia software). In the last few months progress has been made to support other chips (AMD, Chinese chips) in llama.cpp.
With control over HF it could stop development on this, reducing the capability for models to run efficiently on non-Nvidia hardware. Additionally it can promote “Nvidia optimised” models in HF, as it now owns the primary place on earth people go to search for models.
It would basically be like Verizon buying Apple and then Apple “strongly suggesting” you should take out a Verizon plan, all the while stopping Apple developing compatibility with other mobile networks.
ahhh thanks bud, i see
DeleteI think they call it, vertical integration
DeleteNah, Nvidia will just drop support for open models and stuff that supports non Nvidia platforms, anti competitive vendor lock-in
DeleteIs this not going to be blocked by anti monopoly laws? Oh wait the US is lawless grey area under the orange baby nvm.
DeleteThis is definitely in service of continuing that, but I'd wager Nvidia is more interested in preventing HuggingFace from suing OpenAI than anything the company itself has to offer. 13b is a small price to pay for that, they make that in a few weeks.
DeleteThere’s nothing circular about this acquisition.
Delete99% of Americans don't know what Hugging Face is or does. That says it all.
ReplyDeleteIsn't more or less a ai llm docking station.
DeleteEverytime I try to use it for anything I get confused and go back to venice. It's just beyond my technical knowhow.
Isn't it just GitHub for AI models kinda?
DeleteThat is exactly what it is.
DeleteIt is literally a nice UI on top of git and git-lfs
DeleteNot true. They also host and run inference.
DeleteAh. So no EXE?
DeleteIt's a model repo.
DeleteYou host or download models through hugging face
They are referencing a copypasta of a guy raging about GitHub projects not just having an exe to download.
DeleteStupid smelly nerds.
DeleteI love how hilariously reductive this is
DeleteSo why is it worth so much? What's their moat?
DeleteAll open llm and vlm models are there, simple
DeleteIts a value similar to githubs
It’s like their main competition that hosts most of the open source AI models. Basically if they buy it then they corner a larger portion of the market, thus driving more customers and money to themselves - as less people will be able to easily set up and configure open source models on their computers/servers.
DeleteIt isn’t competition. It is vertical integration.
DeleteThey are buying the largest community where LLM experts connect.
NVIDIA has NIM for distribution of models but NIM isn’t trying to compete with HF.
You are absolutely correct though that this gives them a larger portion of the market. I doubt they will outright try to cut competitors like AMD out of HF but they will make sure that NVIDIA is even more synonymous with LLMs than they already are.
It’s not their competition lmao, it’s a pretty natural synergy. nvidia loves open source because it means more people buying their GPUs. People just post shit on here while having no idea what they’re talking about
DeleteYour whole statement is a contradiction tho :/
DeleteHaving access to those open source models, people are able to easily develop, tailor, and share LLMs that work with their configurations and setups. Like there’s tons of models on there that run hyper efficiently with GPUs not even from Nvidia.
It’s not like this is some unhinged conspiracy, many corporations do this all the time. It’s basic business economics. Given enough time it would erode their profits at an exponential rate as hardware prices continue to climb (which they are a major reason for). They want it to lock the shit down and continue to funnel customers towards buying their GPUs and using their models. They do this and hope some other entity doesn’t rise up in the void. But then again they can just buy that company out as well.
But on the whole NVIDIA GPUs are the most common type. Higher GPU demand overall means higher demand for NVIDIA GPUs. Data centers and universities will keep buying NVIDIA GPUs and that’s all that really matters at the end of the day. What you or I do with open source models is barely a blip on the radar for them. The infrastructure built around NVIDIA GPUs is so entrenched that it is very unlikely to change. If you wanted to do research (which is what the majority of huggingface users are doing, local models are not that popular), using something other than an NVIDIA GPU is going to cause you so many headaches it’s not worth it. NVIDIA cares about their power users and huggingface important to those power users who buy a lot from them. They don’t have to stop non-NVIDIA models from being hosted there just like Microsoft doesn’t have to stop any of their competitors from using GitHub. As long as you pay for it (and buy GPUs) they don’t give a fuck.
DeleteIt's Git for AI models and datasets.
DeleteIt's not that complicate
Delete99% of americans don't know a lot of things. Means nothing at all.
DeleteThese technology sub commenters circlejerking each other off on their blind anti-AI crusade. They think because they (who has never studied or worked in machine learning their whole life) don’t know Huggingface, then it’s some unknown worthless organization.
DeleteThere's a big gap between $0 and $12.9 billion. Why is this worth the latter and not like $500k?
Deletebecause other companies also wanted to buy and the price got bid up. Distribution is a moat and users are sticky.
DeleteBecause it became the default repository for the largest technological revolution, likely of human history?
DeleteWhy is it only worth $12.9b and not $50b?
DeleteBecause it’s used hevily by people that matte
Deletei don’t get it, what’s it supposed to say?
DeleteIt's a company that in reality is worth almost nothing, that no one really knows, that does a very specific thing which has totally overinflated value - and it's selling for 12 billion.
DeleteIt's just a perfect example of this insane bubble that is going to burst very soon.
i don't think they're buying the functionality, they're buying the users and the opportunity to shape the model training ecosystem so it favors nvidia gpus even more
Delete99% of americans also don't know what AWS is or does, but it underpins most of the apps and websites they use, it's not really a metric for value
Yeah, saying its worth nothing is insane. If there is one buying it’s worth something.
DeleteIt might not be worth 12B for other companies. But it is worth 12B for nvidia. With Huggingface they own the distribution of models. And Nvidia can skew the platform to favor models that are trained for Nvidia chips, they will make much more than the 12B
Somebody buying something doesn't mean it has worth in a system where parties don't have perfect knowledge.
Delete"Somebody buying something doesn't mean it has worth"
DeleteIncorrect, It's the whole definition of what it means "to be worth"
Maybe the distinction is worth it. There are many instances of companies spending billions on ventures that have gone up in smoke.
Deletethat is quite literally the definition of worth?? if someone is willing to pay 12.9B then it's worth 12.9B
DeleteI mean, they thought it was worth it to them but living long enough shows anybody with the ability to accept when they're wrong that things are not always worth what we pay for them.
DeleteI will buy huggingface for $5.
DeleteIt is now worth $5. Nvidia will have no choice but to try and buy it for $4.
This is my moment, what 7 years of B2B sales and linkedin have prepared me for my whole life.
Only if you can get the other part to sell huggingface for 5 USD. If not, you don’t have a transaction and therefore isn’t worth 5 USD.
DeleteHuggingface is worth 12B because Nvidia agreed to buy it for that and because huggingface agreed to sell at that price. Hence you have transaction.
That's a great deal if you can buy it for $5 lmk if it finalizes.
DeleteIn a similar vein, people complained that WhatsApp was overvalued when meta purchased it.
DeletePeople said the same about twitter. Sure it was maybe but the influence it still has is crazy.
DeleteI mean it was lol but I don't think it really matters.
DeleteOr they just want to help their investors push users using the open source AI models onto their platforms.
DeleteAs others have said, Hugging Face is to AI what GitHub is to software.
DeleteMillions of open source AI models and a robust community behind it.
Yep and very little of this work is of consequence
DeleteHow so? I’ve been on HF for several years and curious why you think their work or the company is of little consequence?
DeleteYou’ve never used an open source model have you?
DeleteI have a qwen model running on a hobby project. So yeah, I have.
DeleteSure doesn't sound like it, the way you are talking about HF.
DeleteUnless they have $12B worth of storage drives, I fail to see how this is worth that much. A wiki and a good file share could replace 99% of it's functionality. Nvidia is buying users and hoping when the hyperscalers crash, they have enough Open Weight local users to keep them propped up.
DeleteThat's exactly what the situation is. They are also hedging their bets against a straight revolt against data centers. They want to be able to shift the processing into homes later.
DeleteYet nothing has replaced it and it is still here and highly valued.
Delete…since the average person hasn’t heard of it that means it’s worthless? Reddit, blogs logic
DeleteMost Americans have no idea what ASML is or does. Does that mean it is also worthless? Public knowledge doesn't mean anything about the value of a company.
DeleteThat was one of the things I said. I also inferred that even if you knew what it was, it's still not worth anything even remotely near 12 billion.
DeleteOh yes, I'm sure Nvidia is being cheated out of 12billion and in fact buys something worthless 🙃
DeleteHa ha. It’s literally the market cap equivalent of 15 hours of Nvidia revenue.
DeleteIn FY27, Nvidia will make over 1.2 billion in revenue per day * 15 hours =0.625 days = $750 million * 18 P/S multiple = 13.5 billion plus.
Today, the HF acquisition driven news cycle has added 2.9% or $150 billion to NVDA market cap.
Calling Huggingface something nobody knows is crazy and shows how clueless you are. They have been in the scene for a long time and much older than most of the current AI startups that are all founded after ChatGPT. How much are they worth? I’m not sure, since they mostly work on open source principles. However, everyone in machine learning has to know about them, only this sub circlejerking each other and calling them worthless and unknown.
DeleteSo it's worth 12 billion.
DeleteEvery child knows that something is worth whatever someone will pay for it at any given moment. That is not what I was talking about. There was a time when NFTs sold for ridiculous suns of money. But, it was worthless in reality.
DeleteHugging face is another example. Has a perceived value that's grossly out of line with reality.
HuggingFace probably boosts the sale of Nvidia cards by quite a bit since it makes it easy to share AI models. It also has an existing user base. With Nvidia buying them out they don't have to worry about the huge bandwidth and storage costs they have, so they will continue to operate in the future and continue boosting Nvidia's ecosystem.
DeleteAbsolute joke of a comment and for the technology sub to be upvoting this.
Delete
DeleteIs this one of the biggest gold rush events since... Klondike or oil?
AI definitely has more value than the .com, but yes there's so much strange business going on. So many real estate people are flipping data center lots that end up never having one, but the middle men made a killing. I happen to have inherited a little piece of one site and lo and behold a data center developer is interested.
I checked around if the region somehow has surplus power, nope, it's the worst region in Norway.
It’s supposed to say AI is bad and AI companies are continuing to spend fake money on each other that doesn’t exist
DeleteSome only because they were hacked. Dont buy Nvidia. Its compromised the moment they implement anythibg from HF
DeleteThen you are behind
Delete99% of america doesn't know what Cencora or McKesson are and they're two of the 10 largest companies in the world
DeleteNot an equivalent. 99% of people also don't know what "Qwen" is and they have no use for it.
DeletePeople absolutely know and use the products that McKesson make and supply - regardless of whether they know it's a McKesson product.
Where your argument fails is that McKesson sells a bajillion syringes and gauze.
In reality, there's a completely inconsequential number of people using Mistral 3.5 medium.
ok. keep moving the goalposts if you want
Delete99% of americans don't know what Reinsurance Group is, and its only customers are insurance companies
Based on what? Because it's certainly not revenue, or by value.
DeleteThis is a bad thing because Hugging Face essentially owns the most-used open-source LLM execution environment (llama.cpp); which has been making inroads in LLM execution on non-CUDA (non-Nvidia) hardware.
ReplyDeleteThis will likely come to an end with this aquisition which is not good at all for the monopoly Nvidia currently holds over inference hardware.
Llama.cpp is MIT licensed and the code base isn't owned by HF.
DeleteYeah, the core dev team that started the project works for HF currently and conceivably they could end their portion of further development on it, but the other 1150+ members that contributed to the project are not HF employees and nothing that has been coded so far is part of the acquisition. With teams like Unsloth out there I don't think we have to worry about THAT aspect of the acquisition.
What we do have to worry about is losing the "Hey, I want an open source model where do I go" one stop shop that has helped people get more involved in ML and LLMs. Hopefully, teams like Unsloth will pick up that ball
It's still a setback though...
DeleteTime to fork the project I guess!
It is indeed a setback, just not the kind of way that I see people worrying about.
DeleteI don't want to understate the extreme importance llama.cpp has had with machine learning and llms, but that particular code genie is out of the bottle and enough people have become interested in open source models that it will continue. The acquisition isn't for a piece of software or the community or anything like that, it's to slow down the way people learn about LLMs and how to run them on consumer grade hardware.
The worst possible scenario for companies like NVIDIA is for someone to find a less hardware intensive way to run a "good enough" model. The best way to slow that from happening is by obscuring as much of the field from the public as possible.
Hugging Face to buy $12.9 billion AI chips from Nvidia soon
ReplyDeleteHugging face to be renamed Kissing Ass
DeleteFuture ai chips, maybe leveraged options for future ai chips.
DeleteGross, money talks I guess. Should not have been sold to an anti consumer company with a history of anti competivite practices and closed standards. Hopefully a independent competitor comes online now.
ReplyDeleteSmaller companies will always take the riches, even from the devil himself. The government should be stopping crap like this but of course they won’t.
DeleteWow high % oligopoly on hardware and models for all of AI. What could go wrong? (It's Skynet)
ReplyDelete"The peasants won't be allowed to build things without our oversight"
ReplyDeleteThis is the world we live in. Our corporative kings will eventually kill open source, mark my works.
you can just make your own public repo
DeleteThe problem is not replicating the functionality but generating a userbase big enough for it to matter.
Deletenvidia is not against open source. The more models that are run, the more gpus they can sell. They want the entire market.
Delete“ nvidia is not against open source”
DeleteX to doubt, though the latter point is true
Point and case: Nvidia drivers and Linux
DeleteThe moment it becomes unprofitable to not attack open source, they will attack open source. It is an inalienable rule of corporations repeated thousands of times across history.
DeleteGood thing open source will always be good for NVIDIA since they’re a shovel seller and open source always increases the demand for shovels
DeleteAI also demands all of the shovels they can possibly produce, so... no need to sell low cost shovels anymore.
DeleteYeah and open models don’t change that it just means more shovel buyers buying at your high prices
DeleteYou mean all of the shovels that TSMC can produce for them, yes?
DeleteProtect ollama at all costs
ReplyDeleteOllama is a VC funded company, it's definitely not the right horse to back either.
DeleteYikes. So nvidia just bought control of where most open source models are housed. Really need a community driven home for the open source stuff when I comes to ai.
ReplyDeleteIt would be overvalued if it was bought at that value by anybody else, but for Nvidia there is huge long-term strategic value even if it was to operate at a loss. Just imagine them making their platform unfriendly to non-NVIDIA workloads and very friendly to their own products and platforms. With integrations into their software and SDKs too.
ReplyDeleteHasn't NVidia already loaned all the AI companies like a bazillion dollars? But that's alright, it's all monopoly money anyway.
ReplyDeleteBig price for basically a cloud storage service
ReplyDeleteIt's not wildly out of line with the $7.5bn Microsoft spent on GitHub in '18.
Deletewe worship the economy and all of it's slippery, ethereal movements. like god before it, it operates both within and above us at all times. 12 billion is hard to conceptualize for the average person.. but hugging face? impossible.
ReplyDeletewhy did god's wrath fall upon the Israelites? why did god send his only son to suffer on behalf of heathens? why did the caliphate, spearheaded by god's appointment prophet, crumble?
why did nvidia buy hugging face for 12.9 billion?
idk man i'm just along for the ride.
"why did nvidia buy hugging face for 12.9 billion?"
DeleteSpecifically, because the Unicode encoding for the hugging face emoji converts to 129303 in decimal. Add a couple of 0s, and that's the price, down to the last $300k.
huggingface is american. This will just push users towards some chinese competitor.
ReplyDeleteBS, just like everyone still centralizes everything in Github (unfortunately)
DeleteA lot of people were downloading the Chinese models through Hugging Face.
DeleteI like to imagine the rogue swarm is still on their servers, self improving and NVidia wants it for themselves, lol
ReplyDeleteRight after openai gave em a good look under the hood.
ReplyDeleteDidn't see that one coming
ReplyDeleteOh no. Goodbye OSS I guess. Maybe not who knows. I hope the downfall will be noticeable though. Then people will jump ship fast. If not we might endure it for a while.
ReplyDeleteSo the maker of the chips all AI is dependant on buying the leading testing org for testing AI. No conflict there at all. I am sure it will be fine.
ReplyDeleteI still don't know what hugging face is, and at this point I'm still not interested enough to find out.
ReplyDeleteIt’s the GitHub equivalent for local models (which the major AI companies HATE since it’s taking away their customers)
DeleteWhat a rip-off! Hugging Face is worth perhaps 4 quadrillions.
ReplyDeleteThis is leading towards an AI oligopoly
ReplyDeleteHealthy reminder that monopolies are illegal and our government doesn't give a shit.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, the people in charge of enforcing those laws are more than likely profiting off the stocks (through insider info) they own on said companies. So yea.
DeleteYay! I buy my critics to silence them!
ReplyDeleteThere's got to be a link between the ai hack and the take over.
ReplyDeleteHuh. Excellent. Guys I’m going back to the 90s fuck yall. This timeline is grossly incompetent
ReplyDeleteMatrix was right the 1990’s was a great time
DeleteThis company still sounds like a fake company. What are they? I literally never hear their name outside of headlines talking about how valuable they are lol
ReplyDeleteGitHub for ai models specifically
DeleteGetting some real Yahoo buying Geocities vibes from this.
ReplyDeleteThat site with the terrible security?
ReplyDeleteNah, that's sittingface
DeleteWhen we finally discover a method of faster than light travel, it will have been by observing goalpost movement.
DeleteSlop buying slop.
ReplyDeletebut it isnt a bubble btw.
I always thought they were a game developer
ReplyDeleteComment deleted by user
ReplyDelete“I have never heard of this 18M users platform, therefore NOBODY has ever heard of it!!”
DeleteComment removed by moderator
ReplyDeleteThis comparison is bizarre. Nvidia is investing using real profits from the real product that people are lined up around the block to buy at any price. SBF essentially took bank deposits from people and then stole them.
DeleteComment has been removed
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