Nvidia has reportedly agreed to acquire Hugging Face, the open-source AI model hub, for $12.9 billion, according to sources cited by CNBC, TechCrunch and other outlets. Neither company has confirmed the deal publicly.
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Transcript
Nvidia has reportedly agreed to pay 12.9 billion dollars for Hugging Face, the site where most of the world's open AI models live. Nobody at either company has confirmed it. But if it's real, it's a huge reversal. Hugging Face's founders once turned down a 500 million dollar offer from Nvidia just to stay independent. Three years ago Nvidia invested at a 4.5 billion dollar valuation. The reported price now is almost triple that, for a company making only about 150 million a year in revenue. Here's why it matters. Hugging Face is supposed to be neutral ground. Models get uploaded there and run on Nvidia chips, AMD chips, Google's TPUs, Amazon's own silicon. That neutrality is the entire reason developers trust it. If the world's dominant AI chip maker owns that hub, the incentives quietly shift, even if nothing changes on day one. Expect regulators to take a hard look before this closes.