Nvidia to buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, report says

Nvidia has reportedly struck a deal to buy open-source AI company Hugging Face for $12.9 billion.

If it goes through, the chipmaker could soon be steward to a millions-strong community of AI developers.

SEE ALSO: Nvidia resurrects older graphics cards as RAM demands impact tech prices Founded in 2016, Hugging Face originated as a chatbot app for teenagers before shifting its focus to machine learning.

It now maintains a large repository of open-source AI models, datasets, and tools contributed by users, stating that it is "on a mission to democratize good machine learning" (emphasis original).

According to Hugging Face , its platform had 13 million users and over 500,000 public datasets last year, and hosts over 3 million models as of last week .

Now, The Information reports that Hugging Face has reached an agreement to sell to Nvidia, citing sources close to the matter.

This partially corroborated a weekend report from Business Insider that Hugging Face was considering an acquisition valued at around $13 billion.

Hugging Face previously rejected Nvidia's $500 million investment offer This isn't the first time Nvidia has expressed interest in Hugging Face.

The chipmaker previously invested in Hugging Face's Series D funding round in 2023 , contributing to the $235 million raised from companies such as Google , Amazon , and Salesforce .

At the time, Hugging Face was valued at $4.5 billion.

According to a Financial Times report, Nvidia subsequently made a $500 million investment offer to Hugging Face late last year, but it was rejected.

Though Hugging Face did not comment specifically on Nvidia's proposal at the time, it reportedly said it didn't want a single dominant investor that might sway decisions.

The deal would have valued Hugging Face at $7 billion.

Hugging Face cofounder Thomas Wolf declined to comment on the rumored sale to Nvidia during a Thursday interview with Bloomberg Tech .