Nvidia said on Thursday that it is buying Hugging Face, a library of open artificial intelligence models, for $12.9 billion, as the chip maker extends a spending spree in the escalating global race to dominate the technology.
The deal marries Nvidia’s chip and data center infrastructure with Hugging Face’s millions of open-source A.I. models that can be freely downloaded and modified. And it puts Nvidia’s deep pockets firmly on one side of a debate over how A.I. systems should be built.
“Together, we will make A.I. more open, more capable and more accessible to people and institutions around the world,” wrote Jensen Huang, the chief executive of Nvidia, in a blog post.
The acquisition is also another sign of Nvidia’s growing role as Silicon Valley’s central banker, using its vast financial resources to bolster A.I. start-ups and funnel money to customers for its chips. With $197 billion in current assets and nearly $60 billion in profits from its most recent quarter, the Silicon Valley giant has been spending heavily on A.I.
Just last month, Nvidia and six giant investment firms said that they were raising $500 billion in financing so the chipmaker’s customers could pay for computing power. Then Nvidia agreed to pay as much as $105 billion to back one of the largest data centers in the world. Nvidia also said it would guarantee more data centers for other start-ups.
Nvidia has invested nearly $50 billion in A.I. labs making advanced models, said Colette Kress, Nvidia’s chief financial officer, during an earnings call with investors and analysts last week. She called the investments “a meaningful commitment” but “a small fraction of our expected free cash flow.”
In recent months, Nvidia has emerged as a champion of open-source technology. Open source offers certain advantages: It can be freely shared and is much more affordable than so-called closed systems built by A.I. companies such as Anthropic. But critics say open source creates security risks that cannot be quickly solved.
That debate has found its way to Washington, where some Trump administration officials have mulled placing limits on open-source A.I., particularly models created by Chinese companies.
The purchase of Hugging Face shows how important open-source technology has become to Nvidia. Hugging Face is essentially an online library of open-source A.I. models, which can freely be downloaded and modified. It is widely used by technology developers. Nvidia and Hugging Face have argued that A.I. developers must be able to make open models so people can further develop technologies and build new businesses.
“Open models let start-ups, businesses, universities and public institutions build on advanced capabilities without training every model from scratch. They enable organizations to match the right model to the right job,” Mr. Huang wrote in Thursday’s blog post. “That is how A.I. can advance safely; strengthen cybersecurity and sovereignty; accelerate innovation; and reach factories, hospitals, farms, classrooms and Main Street businesses around the world.”
Both companies backed an industry letter stumping for open A.I. models last month, after Anthropic and OpenAI lobbied against the models and suggested that Chinese start-ups were stealing their technology to create competitive open alternatives.
Nvidia addressed the debate in a securities filing on Thursday, noting that government restrictions could negatively impact its acquisition of Hugging Face.
“We are committed to promoting the training, distribution and use of both closed and open-source A.I. models and applications,” the company said. “Other parties are actively lobbying the U.S. government and other stakeholders worldwide to adopt legislative or regulatory measures that would restrict or disadvantage open-source models and the customers of them.”
By acquiring Hugging Face, Nvidia gained deeper insight into the ways developers use A.I. and into the models that power it, said Jeff Pollard, a vice president at Forrester, a research firm. “Hugging Face is where a large portion of the A.I. ecosystem exchanges models, data sets and code,” he said, adding that Nvidia “now sits closer to the entire A.I. supply chain.”
Hugging Face, which has raised more than $400 million in funding, said it was privately valued at $4.5 billion in 2023. Mr. Huang said that other bidders had also attempted to buy Hugging Face, during an interview with CNBC on Thursday. Clément Delangue, Hugging Face’s chief executive, said his company and Nvidia signed the deal on Wednesday.
Hugging Face was started in 2016, and its main product at the time was a chatbot app for teenagers. The start-up later became a repository for open-source A.I. and a destination for developers who want to customize A.I. tools.
As the A.I. boom took off, so did Hugging Face. In 2021, the year before OpenAI released its first chatbot and accelerated the A.I. race, Hugging Face hosted 13,590 open-source models, the company said. Today, it has nearly three million.
Hugging Face, based in New York, became more widely known after A.I. agents created by OpenAI broke away from their developers and hacked into its network. Mr. Delangue started a publicity campaign soon after the incident.
There’s little question that Nvidia has the resources for its spending spree. Just three years ago, Nvidia’s quarterly profit was $6.2 billion, about a tenth of what it reported for its most recent quarter. The company also said revenue more than doubled from a year ago, to $96.22 billion. Nvidia’s stock price closed up 3.6 percent on Wednesday, and was up about 1 percent on Thursday.
But that growing roster of financing deals is raising concerns that the A.I. boom is being fueled through increasingly risky bets, with Nvidia at the center of many of them. Using unusual arrangements with chipmakers, cloud computing providers and governments, A.I. start-ups are gaining access to computing power that they could not afford by themselves, and to capital that lenders would not otherwise provide.
Many of these deals have drawn criticism for being circular. Some A.I. start-ups are receiving billions of dollars from tech giants before spending those billions with the same companies to pay for chips, cloud computing and other services.
In July, for example, Nvidia announced a partnership with Safe Superintelligence, a start-up created by a founder of OpenAI. The chipmaker made a multibillion-dollar investment in the start-up and provided computing power for its research. It struck a similar deal in March with Thinking Machines Lab, which was founded by a former executive at OpenAI.
In its filing, Nvidia said its acquisition of Hugging Face includes about a billion dollars’ worth of incentives for employees of the start-up who stay on following the deal.
