Nvidia will buy popular developer platform Hugging Face for US$12.93 billion, betting that support for open AI models will drive future demand even as its biggest customers develop their own chips to reduce reliance on the semiconductor giant.

Shares of the company were up 1.5 percent after the deal was announced on Thursday, which ranks among its biggest.

The deal will cement Nvidia as a central player in the market for open models that users can freely download, run and customise, unlike the closed systems built by OpenAI and Anthropic.

Nvidia has already played an active role in backing the open AI industry with its widely used Nemotron model.

Acquiring Hugging Face will give it direct access to a platform developers use to collaborate, test and share tools using various open AI models, potentially providing valuable insight and data to help it narrow the technology gap with top US and Chinese labs.

"Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem," Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said, adding that his company's chips would not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face.

Under the deal, Nvidia will pay about US$11.9 billion to Hugging Face investors, while offering an equity-based retention programme of up to US$1 billion for employees who join Nvidia.

The two companies already work together to help developers use Nvidia's computing services on the platform.

Hugging Face was valued at US$4.5 billion in its last disclosed funding round in August 2023, when it raised US$235 million from investors such as Salesforce, AMD and Amazon.

Nvidia, meanwhile, exited its July quarter with US$22.44 billion in cash and cash equivalents, more than double January's US$10.61 billion, giving the chipmaker substantial capacity to fund the deal.

That financial strength reflects a rapidly expanding business. Late last month, Nvidia issued a rare year-ahead outlook, forecasting revenue growth of about 70 percent in fiscal 2028 as the AI infrastructure boom rages on.

But the chipmaker's use of its balance sheet has also drawn scrutiny. Deals such as its agreement to guarantee up to US$105 billion for OpenAI's Ohio data-centre lease have intensified investor concerns that Nvidia is supporting the demand driving its growth. (Reuters)


Edited by Edmond Fong