NVIDIA Is Buying Hugging Face for $12.9 Billion

Well, this is unexpected. There were rumours while I was away–and Hugging Face reportedly turned down a $500 million NVIDIA investment earlier this year–but buying the entire thing for $12.9 billion doesn’t fit my mental model of NVIDIA, given its… spotty Open Source report card. They certainly have the money, given their current valuation and a quarterly revenue run rate closing in on $100 billion. This feels like the same sort of stack consolidation that happened as public cloud took off and GitHub was acquired: owning the place where models live is a lot more ecosystem presence than pushing Nemotron models out in a corner and hoping people notice. I guess it makes sense. I am just not sure Hugging Face under NVIDIA is quite the same proposition…