San Francisco: Chipmaker Nvidia will acquire Hugging Face, a leading platform for artificial intelligence models and datasets, for $13 billion, the company said. Founder and chief executive Jensen Huang announced the move in a blog post.
According to Huang, more than 18 million developers, researchers and creators are active on Hugging Face. The platform hosts more than three million models, 500,000 datasets and over a million applications, and is used by more than 200,000 companies worldwide, the company claims.
As demand for computing power in AI grows, the deal is seen as significant. Nvidia is already the leading supplier of AI chips. Taking over the platform for models and the developer community would strengthen its position further, analysts said.
Experts said a big question is what the deal means for the open-source AI community. Developers are debating whether the platform's independence and open-source principles will hold. The company said it has assured the community of its cooperation.
The deal will be implemented after its terms and regulatory approvals are completed. Experts said the tie-up could deepen Nvidia's dominance in the global AI race.
The acquisition, if completed, would be among the largest in the fast-consolidating AI industry. It also raises questions about concentration, as Nvidia's chips already power a large share of the world's AI training and inference. Regulators in the United States and Europe are expected to examine the deal closely. Rival firms and open-source groups are watching whether access to the platform's models and tools will remain open to all.