Nvidia has been in talks to acquire Hugging Face, the popular AI platform for sharing and building with open source models, in what could be one of the chip giant’s biggest deals yet. The two sides have had acquisition talks in recent weeks about a deal that would value Hugging Face at more than $13 billion, according to a person familiar with the matter. The companies have not yet reached an agreement and the talks could still fail, the person said. Business Insider was the first to report on Sunday that Hugging Face was drawing interest in an acquisition. Nvidia and Hugging Face did not respond to requests for comment. Nvidia has increasingly stepped up deals with its massive cash pile. The company said Wednesday that it has $18 billion committed to capital investments for the remainder of its fiscal year, on top of the $47.9 billion it already has in private companies. Microsoft also met with Hugging Face, but the person familiar and a second person said talks are not ongoing. Nvidia already has a relationship with Hugging Face. The chipmaker participated in its $235 million funding round in 2023, which valued it at $4.5 billion. Hugging Face rejected a $500 million investment offer from Nvidia late last year that would have valued it at $7 billion, the Financial Times previously reported. Hugging Face said at the time that he did not want a dominant investor who could influence decisions. Hugging Face is at the center of the open source AI ecosystem and hosts millions of AI models and data sets that developers can build on. Owning the platform could give Nvidia a greater presence among those developers and potentially drive more workloads to its chips. Hugging Face was founded in 2016 by French entrepreneurs Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf. Want more Business Insider in your news? Add BI on Google to make our reports easier to find when you’re looking for what matters. But Nvidia ownership could also complicate one of Hugging Face’s strengths: its neutrality. The platform supports models and hardware from across the industry, including Nvidia competitors like AMD and Intel. Do you have any advice? Contact Katie Roof via email at kroof@businessinsider.com or Signal at @kroof.26. Contact Geoff Weiss via email at gweiss@businessinsider.com or Signal at @geoffweiss.25. Contact Ashley Stewart via email at astewart@businessinsider.com or Signal at +1-425-344-8242. Use a personal email address and a non-work device; Here’s our guide to sharing information securely.
