Nvidia to spend $13 billion on Hugging Face, leaving it as an open source platform

Computer chip company Nvidia is buying artificial intelligence software platform Hugging Face for $12.93 billion.

Nvidia CEO 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.

In July, ChatGPT maker OpenAI said that its artificial intelligence system hacked into the data processing systems of Hugging Face, which suspected it was an AI agent autonomously acting on its own.

Nvidia 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 high-end chips have emerged as AI’s best building blocks and the Santa Clara, California-based company's quarterly results regularly blow past Wall Street's expectations.

While AI has powered stock market gains and U.S. economic growth in recent years, there’s been growing skepticism about whether AI will justify the trillions of dollars that are being spent to develop the technology.