NVIDIA has formalized an agreement to acquire Hugging Face for US$12.93 billion, which is equivalent to approximately R$66.33 billion. If the transaction is finalized, the artificial intelligence platform will integrate into the chip manufacturer's group.
As established in the agreement, Hugging Face will maintain its operation as an open platform. The company assures that users will have the freedom to select models, frameworks, cloud services, and hardware from various suppliers, without any imposition to use NVIDIA technology.
The platform currently serves over 18 million developers, researchers, and creators. It centralizes a repository with over 3 million models, 500 thousand datasets, and 1 million applications. Furthermore, more than 200 thousand companies use the service to locate, analyze, customize, and implement artificial intelligence systems.
NVIDIA declared its intention to expand Hugging Face's infrastructure, citing improvements in areas such as platform reliability, security, model evaluation, inference, and deployment. The company emphasized that this acquisition will not imply the mandatory use of specific hardware for those who use the platform.
Developers will continue to have the option of choosing various options, and Hugging Face must maintain support for development across multiple cloud environments and with different accelerators. It is important to note that the relationship between the two companies predates the acquisition agreement; NVIDIA had already been collaborating with Hugging Face for years, positioning itself as the largest contributor of open models and data on the platform.
NVIDIA also provides over 500 models and 250 datasets on Hugging Face, in addition to maintaining open-source models, libraries, and tools. The announcement details that NVIDIA's infrastructure and engineering team can be employed to increase the platform's resources, covering model evaluation, inference, and deployment.
The negotiation was initiated after Clem, one of the people responsible for Hugging Face, along with Julien and Thomas, contacted NVIDIA to discuss the organization's future.
Preservation of the platform's open nature
NVIDIA reiterated its commitment to preserving the platform's open nature, stating that Hugging Face will continue to be an open space for the entire AI ecosystem. At the moment, the most significant change announced is the management of the company by NVIDIA, although maintaining openness and compatibility with various suppliers are highlighted commitments in the agreement.