NVIDIA has announced it is buying Hugging Face in a deal valued at $12.93 billion. In a statement, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang said the company will work to scale Hugging Face's platform and strengthen its infrastructure. If the deal meets regulatory approval, it will put NVIDIA in a dominant position in both AI hardware and open AI software.

Hugging Face, essentially GitHub for AI, enables developers to share, discover and test open source AI models. In 2022, as the generative AI boom began, the platform established itself as the central hub for this community. It now has more than 18 million users sharing three million models, with more than 200,000 companies using the models in their businesses.

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has pledged that Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem. He added NVIDIA is a big contributor to the platform, including more than 500 models and 250 open datasets. Some analysts believe open-source AI will play an increasingly important role alongside proprietary frontier models from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google.

Earlier this month, Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue said China was winning the AI race due to its embrace of open models. NVIDIA was already an investor in Hugging Face, having participated in at least one funding round in 2023.