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NVIDIA is buying Hugging Face - the largest open-source AI platform for $12.9B. This is one of the biggest acquisitions in NVIDIA’s history:
Hugging Face is a hub for open-source AI, where developers share, download and run AI models. It was founded in 2016 and has become the main home for open models.
Buying it gives NVIDIA a strong position in open-source AI.
Here's the logic behind the deal:
NVIDIA's biggest customers, including OpenAI, Google, Amazon and Anthropic, are all building their own AI chips to cut their dependence on NVIDIA.
Open-source works against that. Instead of relying on closed labs, companies can build and run their own models, and most of them run on NVIDIA hardware. Owning Hugging Face keeps more of that work on NVIDIA chips.
There's also a cloud angle. Hugging Face already lets customers rent compute to run models. NVIDIA can use that to grow its AI cloud business.
Hugging Face by the numbers:
=> $12.9B acquisition price
=> $150M annual revenue, up from $100M two months earlier
=> $4.5B valuation in its last raise, back in 2023
=>$7B valuation in NVIDIA's investment offer last year
That's nearly 3x its 2023 valuation, and about 86x its revenue.
NVIDIA already invested in Hugging Face in 2023. Last year it offered $500M for a bigger stake, but Hugging Face rejected it over independence concerns. Now it's selling the whole company.
So why say yes now? For Hugging Face, the deal means more funding, compute and infrastructure to scale and compete with bigger labs. NVIDIA gets strategic control and developer reach.
W NVIDIA 🙌
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