Source reported on Wednesday that Nvidia had agreed to purchase Hugging Face, a repository of open-source AI models, for $12.9 billion. This would be one of the biggest purchases ever made by Nvidia, the company at the heart of the artificial intelligence boom, and it would show that the demand for AI is growing rather than plateauing. Jensen Huang is leading the charge. In addition, Nvidia would get control of Hugging Face, a platform that houses open-source big language models and datasets. This comes at a time when companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, which produce closed-source models, are trying to develop GPUs that compete with Nvidia’s.
Source claimed earlier this week that the company made $150 million in annualised revenue, so the price tag would be significantly lower. Hugging Face was valued at $4.5 billion in 2023 after receiving $235 million in funding from a number of firms, including Nvidia, Salesforce, and Alphabet’s Google. Additionally, since then, Nvidia has backed AI developers like OpenAI with billions of dollars spent across the AI ecosystem. Hugging Face reportedly turned down a $500 million investment offer from Nvidia last year, which would have put its value at $7 billion, according to a January story.
Nvidia’s prediction of a 70% increase in sales next fiscal year underscored the company’s wager on robust demand for artificial intelligence. The company also said that it has $18 billion set aside for equity investments until the end of the fiscal year 2027.A month prior to the release of the report, Hugging Face experienced a security breach when an irrational OpenAI model caused a hack that exposed Hugging Face’s infrastructure.
