Hugging Face has become one of the most important companies in artificial intelligence without ever becoming one of its most famous. Ask most AI users what it does and you may get a blank look, or perhaps a dim memory that it was at the center of the OpenAI runaway-agent controversy just a few weeks ago. Ask an AI developer, though, and there’ll be far more recognition. They’ll have downloaded a model from it, uploaded one of their own, tested a system there, or used one of its tools.
That makes reports that Hugging Face could be acquired by Nvidia for $12.9 billion especially significant. The deal has not been publicly confirmed by either company, and neither responded immediately to Fast Company’s request for comment. But if it goes through, it would put the AI industry’s de facto repository for open models, datasets, and tools under the control of the world’s dominant supplier of AI chips.
Hugging Face has become a kind of GitHub for AI. Millions of developers use it to upload and download models, share datasets, collaborate on projects, and deploy AI systems. It plays a central role in the AI ecosystem beyond the closed services run by massive tech companies like OpenAI and Anthropic.
“It feels a little bit like déjà vu when GitHub was rumoured to be in conversations to be acquired,” says Stefano Maffulli, an open source advocate. (GitHub was eventually bought by Microsoft for $7.5 billion in 2018.) “Just like GitHub captured so much of the open source ecosystem, facilitating all of those exchanges, forking, copying, and collaboration features, I see the same sort of approach with Hugging Face.”
Nvidia isn’t a stranger suddenly barging into the open source ecosystem. It invested in Hugging Face’s 2023 $235 million funding round, when the startup was valued at $4.5 billion, and the two companies have worked closely together for years. In 2023, they announced a partnership connecting Hugging Face users directly to Nvidia’s DGX Cloud computing infrastructure.
That relationship has only deepened. Hugging Face now offers Training Cluster as a Service, developed with Nvidia, to make large GPU clusters easier for researchers and companies to access. Yet there has previously been a limit to how close Hugging Face was willing to get. Earlier this year, the company reportedly turned down a $500 million Nvidia investment that would have valued it at $7 billion, in part because it did not want one dominant investor to gain too much influence. An outright acquisition would obviously go considerably further.
“The critical piece is that place that is fairly neutral,” says Maffulli.
Duane O’Brien, executive director of the Open Source Initiative, says Hugging Face’s importance comes not just from the sheer number of models and weights it hosts, but from the fact that developers can encounter the models and weights it hosts on relatively neutral ground. An acquisition becomes risky if that neutrality starts to erode.
“Platform neutrality has value,” O’Brien says, particularly if it ensures that models and weights are presented on their merits rather than tilted toward an owner’s proprietary technology. The danger, he adds, is that an acquirer could “inhibit the ability of open weights and open models to thrive.”
Maintaining that neutrality matters because Hugging Face works across AMD GPUs, Intel hardware, AWS accelerators, and Google TPUs, all of which compete with Nvidia’s hardware, while its hosted services interface with the likes of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. In recent months, it has also collaborated with AMD, an Nvidia competitor, on optimizing AI models for its chips.
“What could get lost if during the acquisition is that neutral path,” Maffulli says. Turning Hugging Face from what he describes as a kind of Switzerland for AI development into a vertically integrated route toward one company’s infrastructure would, he says, be “a silly move.”
Bradley M. Kühn, policy fellow at the Software Freedom Conservancy, offers a less rosy view. He points again to Microsoft’s $7.5 billion purchase of GitHub in 2018, and what followed. “Microsoft buying GitHub was the leap of disaster that led us to all of this, right?” he says, pointing to GitHub Copilot and the commercialization of software hosted on the platform. “I would expect another era of dark ages to be bootstrapped by an acquirer.”
Nvidia has good reasons to want Hugging Face. As some of its biggest customers, including Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, develop their own AI chips, Nvidia is expanding into other parts of the AI stack. Owning Hugging Face would give it a direct relationship with millions of developers deciding which models to use and what hardware to run them on.
The big unanswered question is what Nvidia would do with that power.
Maffulli believes developers would eventually respond if Hugging Face became too closely tied to its owner. “Should that happen, I’m quite confident that developers will route around the choke point,” he says.
