NVIDIA has agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, with CEO Jensen Huang announcing the deal in a blog post today. NVIDIA says Hugging Face will remain an independent company and, more importantly, an open platform, with no hardware restrictions for users.

Hugging Face was founded in 2016 as a chatbot company and evolved into a central hub for the AI community. It hosts over 3 million models, 500,000 datasets, and 1 million applications, used by more than 18 million developers and 200,000 companies.

NVIDIA is already the platform's largest contributor of open models and data, with over 500 models and 250 open datasets. Hugging Face co-founder and CEO Clément Delangue said the company approached NVIDIA for more compute, support, and infrastructure, and NVIDIA committed to keeping the platform open, independent, and compute-agnostic.

Both sides outlined that multi-cloud and multi-accelerator support will continue, and model builders from across the ecosystem, not just NVIDIA hardware users, will keep being supported.