Nvidia Acquires Hugging Face for $12.9 Billion

Is this a triumph for open-source AI or a calculated move to protect Nvidia's GPU monopoly?

5 days ago·Updated 4 days ago

Nvidia Acquires Hugging Face for $12.9 Billion

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Above: Clément Delangue in San Francisco, California, on May 9, 2024. Image credit: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg/Getty Images

The Spin

Narrative A

This is a massive win for open-source AI — the deal brings the compute, infrastructure and scale needed to make open-source the default way to build AI. Hugging Face stays open, independent and compute-agnostic, and the full team stays on to keep pushing the mission. This backing lets 100 million AI builders own their intelligence instead of renting it.

Jensen Huang on X

Thomas Wolf on X

Clément Delangue on X

Narrative B

Nvidia paying $12.9 billion — 86 times revenue — for a free model-sharing platform isn't generosity. OpenAI, Anthropic and Google are all building their own chips to escape Nvidia's grip, and open-source systems running on CUDA GPUs are the one ecosystem that can't defect. Owning Hugging Face locks in the distribution layer for the corner of AI that keeps Nvidia relevant no matter what.

Vaibhav Sisinty on X

Aakash Gupta on X

Bull Theory on X

Metaculus Prediction

There's a 26% chance that before 2028, powerful open-source AI will be regulated more tightly than closed-source AI, through newly enacted U.S. law, according to the Metaculus prediction community.