Nvidia to spend $13 bil. on Hugging Face, leaving it as open source platform

Nvidia is buying artificial intelligence software platform Hugging Face for $12.93 billion. Jensen Huang wrote in a blog post Thursday that more than 18 million developers, researchers and creators use Hugging Face to share more than 3 million models, 500,000 data sets and 1 million applications. There's also more than 200,000 companies that use the platform, he said. The AI chipmaker will keep Hugging Face as an open platform. “Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem. Developers will choose the models they want, the frameworks they want, the clouds and inference service providers they want and the computing platforms they want,” Huang wrote. “Nvidia compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face.” Hugging Face will still support open source and open weight models as well as multi-cloud and multi-accelerator development and deployment. Nvidia has released more than 500 models on Hugging Face and more than 250 open datasets. Nvidia's stock rose slightly before the market open.