NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang announced an agreement to acquire Hugging Face, a leading open source AI model repository, for US$12.93 billion. A deal of this magnitude has sparked heated debate in the developer community about the future of the independent artificial intelligence ecosystem.
NVIDIA management said Hugging Face will continue to operate as an independent company and an open platform. There are no planned hardware limitations for users – the service will retain support for solutions from other vendors (AMD, Intel, AWS Silicon) and multi-cloud infrastructure.
Launched in 2016 as a chatbot development startup, the service currently hosts more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets and 1 million applications. It is used by more than 18 million developers and researchers and more than 200,000 companies worldwide. NVIDIA itself has long been the platform’s largest contributor (over 500 of its own models and 250 datasets).