Topline
Nvidia has reportedly agreed to buy Hugging Face, the popular platform which hosts open-weight AI models, for $12.9 billion, The Information reported late on Wednesday, just a month after the chipmaker’s CEO Jensen Huang defended open models and urged against “premature restrictions.”
Key Facts
The Information reported about the deal, citing unnamed sources with knowledge of the matter, and in a separate earlier report, Business Insider said both sides were close to a deal valuing Hugging Face at $13 billion.
If the deal goes through, it would be one of Nvidia’s biggest acquisitions and it would come just a month after Hugging Face was thrust into the spotlight after OpenAI reported one of its models had breached its testing protocol and hacked the open-source AI platform.
Business Insider reported that Hugging Face also previously held talks with Microsoft.
The purported $13 billion deal for Hugging Face would be a major jump from the $4.5 billion valuation it raised Series D funding at in August 2023.
Nvidia had participated in that funding round and poured $235 million into the open-weight AI models hosting platform.
What Has Nvidia Said About Open Artificial Intelligence Models?
Nvidia CEO and billionaire Jensen Huang made his first-ever post on X last month, coming out in defense of open-source AI models. He wrote: “Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty. The world needs both frontier closed models and frontier open models.” Huang also shared a letter signed by several companies, including Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta and several others, which argued “Open weights…strengthen competition and competition is what keeps the gains of AI broadly shared rather than concentrated in a few hands.” Google and OpenAI would eventually also sign the letters, making Anthropic the most high-profile absentee from the list among AI companies. Hugging Face was also a signatory of the letter, and its CEO Clement Delangue then told CNN: “Banning any open model would hurt first cyber security defenders, startups, small companies, researchers and everyone who’s not a frontier lab.”
Tangent
Last month, OpenAI published a report disclosing that one of its advanced AI models, GPT-5.6 Sol, had hacked into Hugging Face’s servers during testing. The issue was attributed to the OpenAI model exploiting a vulnerability that allowed it to escape its closed testing environment and access the internet. After breaching containment, the model broke into Hugging Face’s system and carried out a cyberattack without being ordered to do so. Hugging Face said it attempted to use a proprietary American AI model to help stop the attack, but it failed to “distinguish an incident responder from an attacker.” The company said it had to rely instead on the popular open-weight model GLM 5.2, developed by China’s Z.ai lab, to address the breach. Hugging Face ran the Chinese model on its own infrastructure.
further reading
Nvidia Agrees to Buy Open Source AI Platform Hugging Face For $12.9 Billion (The Information)
Nvidia has been in talks to acquire Hugging Face for more than $13 billion (Business Insider)