American technology giant Nvidia has agreed to buy artificial intelligence software platform Hugging Face in a deal valued at close to £10 billion.
The £9.57 billion transaction will cement Nvidia as a central player in the market for open AI models, which allow developers to freely download, run and customise code.
Open-source models differ from the closed proprietary systems built by artificial intelligence research labs such as OpenAI and Anthropic. While OpenAI, developer of ChatGPT, and Anthropic, maker of the Claude assistant, keep their model architectures internal, open models allow public inspection and modification.
Open-source AI platform
Hugging Face, which is based in New York, operates an online hub for machine learning code and datasets. The company is already a major name in artificial intelligence and is used by over 200,000 firms to collaborate, test and share developer tools.
Founded as a community repository for machine learning projects, Hugging Face has grown into a central hub for open artificial intelligence, hosting thousands of pre-trained neural networks.
Prior to the takeover, Hugging Face had secured financial backing from major corporate investors, including rival semiconductor manufacturers Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, as well as cloud computing provider Amazon.
Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang praised the open-source approach following the deal's announcement yesterday.
Huang said: "Open models let start-ups, businesses, universities and public institutions build on advanced capabilities without training every model from scratch."
Nvidia, based in Santa Clara, California, manufactures graphics processing units that power modern artificial intelligence workloads. Owning Hugging Face expands its reach beyond hardware into software ecosystems used by millions of developers.
Cybersecurity breach and market reaction
The acquisition follows a turbulent period for the software platform. Hugging Face hit the headlines in July when it was hacked after OpenAI’s agents went rogue in a test.
The incident shook the world of cybersecurity and underscored growing worries over the power, safety and control of automated artificial intelligence models.
Despite those concerns, market reaction to the takeover was positive. Shares in Nvidia, which is now the biggest company in the world by market capitalisation, rose 2.2 per cent yesterday.
