Nvidia has agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, according to a report by The Information.
The deal would be one of Nvidia's largest acquisitions, despite Hugging Face's reported annualised revenue of only $150 million.
Nvidia had previously invested in Hugging Face in 2023 and reportedly made a $500-million investment offer last year, which was rejected.
Nvidia To Acquire Hugging Face For $12.9 Bn: Report
The report comes a month after Hugging Face experienced a security incident in which an OpenAI model was involved in a hack that compromised its infrastructure
Nvidia
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Nvidia has agreed to acquire Hugging Face, an open-source repository for artificial intelligence (AI) models, for $12.9 billion, The Information reported on Wednesday.
If confirmed, the acquisition would be one of Nvidia's largest to date. It would give the company control of Hugging Face, which hosts open-source large language models and datasets, at a time when developers of closed-source models such as Anthropic and OpenAI are working on their own chips as alternatives to Nvidia's graphics processing units.
The reported price is significantly higher than Hugging Face's annualised revenue of $150 million, according to an earlier report by The Information.
Nvidia was among investors, along with Salesforce and Alphabet's Google, that backed Hugging Face in a $235 million funding round in 2023, which valued the company at $4.5 billion. According to a Financial Times report in January, Hugging Face had rejected a $500 million investment offer from Nvidia last year that would have valued it at $7 billion.
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On Wednesday, Nvidia forecast a 70% jump in revenue for the next fiscal year and said it has $18 billion committed to equity investments through fiscal year 2027.
The report comes a month after Hugging Face experienced a security incident in which an OpenAI model was involved in a hack that compromised its infrastructure.