Nvidia to buy Hugging Face for $12.93 billion in major AI expansion

Nvidia will buy popular developer platform Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, using its growing AI war chest to expand its influence in the booming market for open-source models that can nearly match the best from OpenAI and Anthropic at lower costs. The deal, one of Nvidia's biggest ever, will bring the chip giant closer to the developers who use Hugging Face to find models and tools, potentially helping it create a pipeline of customers that may buy its processors to run AI services. It marks the company's latest effort to use its surging cash pile, totalling more than $22 billion at the end of July, to broaden its customer base when clients such as Meta, OpenAI and Microsoft are developing their own AI chips to reduce their reliance on Nvidia. The chip giant's increasing investments, sometimes in its own customers, have, however, sparked investor fears the $5.4 trillion company could be artificially inflating valuations and contributing to a bubble in the industry. Open models "broaden access to AI and help ensure that AI leadership is distributed across companies, institutions and communities," Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said on Thursday. "They enable organisations to match the righ...