Nvidia agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.9B, according to The Information, which sourced the deal to one person with knowledge of it. Hugging Face runs the largest open-model repository anywhere, and Nvidia’s thinking is that a strong field of open models works as a counterweight to Anthropic and OpenAI, both of which are designing their own server chips to depend less on Nvidia. The price comes to roughly 80 times a $150M annualized revenue figure, steep against current comparables, though that number sat near $100M two months ago and CEO Clem Delangue has said it is “close to profitability.” Talks opened after a different suitor approached Hugging Face, and Salesforce was among the investors that had shown interest. Google, Microsoft, and Amazon had all put money in as well.
