Nvidia has today confirmed its acquisition of open-source AI model repository Hugging Face for $12.93bn, as it makes a big bet on open-source AI models and continues to plough billions into the broader AI ecosystem.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said Nvidia would look to scale Hugging Face’s platform, strengthen its infrastructure, and offer greater access to AI for developers and institutions.

In a blog post, Huang said: “Hugging Face will continue to support open source and open weight models from across the ecosystem, from every model builder. It will continue to support multi-cloud and multi-accelerator development and deployment, so builders can use the hardware and infrastructure that best fit their work.”

The deal is expected to be completed in the first half of 2027.

Huang, who has been a vocal supporter of open source AI models, highlighted that Nvidia had released more than 500 AI models on Hugging Face, which hosts three million models and is used by around 18 million developers.

Based in New York, Hugging Face, which was founded in France in 2016, provides a repository where developers can download AI models, tools for running models, datasets for training AI models, as well as a community where developers and researchers can publish and collaborate on AI models.

Nvidia backed Hugging Face in a $235m Series D funding round in 2023, valuing it at $4.5bn, which is Hugging Face's last known valuation.

The deal underscores Nvidia’s heavy investment across the AI ecosystem, investing billions in AI labs and investing in startups that buy its chips.

Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf, said: “No company in the world has been a more natural fit with our mission than Nvidia. From open-source, open-weights and open science to robotics and AI for science, they have been close partners across everything we care about. So when Jensen offered Clement Delangue the opportunity to double down on building the Hub as an open, independent and compute agnostic platform, we decided the time was right to start the next 10 years of our journey together.”

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