Nvidia confirms it will buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion

Nvidia confirmed it acquired Hugging Face for $12.93 billion. The platform hosts 3 million models, 1 million apps, and 500,000 datasets, used by over 18 million developers. CEO Jensen Huang said Hugging Face will stay open, with no requirement to use Nvidia compute. Nvidia has released 500+ models and 250 open datasets on the platform. Owning an open ecosystem helps Nvidia optimize for its chips and sell unused capacity.

Why it matters: Nvidia buying HuggingFace for $12.93B is the biggest AI infra M&A this year. The 3M models + 18M devs ecosystem scale, plus Jensen Huang's careful promise to keep it open without forcing Nvidia chips, gives this story shock value, concrete numbers, and instant debate fuel. All...