Nvidia officially announces $12.9 billion acquisition of Hugging Face

Nvidia officially announced its $12.9 billion acquisition of artificial intelligence platform Hugging Face – the maker of graphics cards and AI accelerators decided to go beyond hardware and expand its influence in the AI ​​ecosystem.

Photo credit: Mariia Berezovsky / unsplash.com

Thanks to The Information for reporting on the deal last week, Hugging Face “Will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem. Together, we will expand the Hugging Face platform, strengthen its infrastructure, and expand access to AI for developers and organizations around the world.”Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said.

Hugging Face approached Mr Huang last summer about the deal, which has now been completed. “Over the summer, we realized that Hugging Face and open AI in general were at an inflection point where they needed more — more resources, more scale, more transparency.”said Clément Delangue, CEO of Hugging Face. The platform chose Nvidia because the chipmaker demonstrated its “ideal home” Hug the face; negotiations move quickly and deals are struck.

This is Nvidia’s second-largest acquisition after acquiring Groq assets for $20 billion last December. Before that, the largest deal was the $7 billion acquisition of Israeli chipmaker Mellanox in 2019. Nvidia has become the world’s most valuable company due to demand for its artificial intelligence accelerators; acquiring Hugging Face is a major bet on a popular artificial intelligence platform and an opportunity for Nvidia to show that it is more than just a chip maker. “I’m honored that Clément reached out to me as we consider the next phase of Hugging Face’s growth and think Nvidia will be a great home for the company, the community, and the future of the open model.”Huang Renxun admitted.