Maybe, for NVIDIA, controlling developer software tools matters as much as selling graphics chips.
This might be NVIDIA’s boldest move yet. The chip manufacturing powerhouse is finalizing a $13 billion deal to acquire Hugging Face- the well-known platform for open-source AI models and datasets.
This price tag is a massive leap for the startup.
Hugging Face held a $4.5 billion valuation in 2023 and even turned down a $500 million investment from NVIDIA last year. And now the latter is acquiring the entire company.
It’s obvious that NVIDIA dominates hardware today, but chip sales alone can’t guarantee sustainable dominance. Its competitors have actively acquired infrastructure to design custom silicon to bypass NVIDIA GPUs.
But owning Hugging Face might change this equation. More than 13 million developers build, host, and test AI software on Hugging Face every month. And NVIDIA binds those developers directly to its ecosystem by buying the central hub of open-source development.
As a result, NVIDIA gains the power to ensure that millions of open-source models primarily run on its own hardware. The company is locking in the software infrastructure for AI’s next decade.
