Microchip giant Nvidia (NVDA) has agreed to buy open-source artificial intelligence (A.I.) platform Hugging Face for $12.9 billion U.S.
The acquisition is the second largest in Nvidia’s history after the company paid $20 billion U.S. last year to acquire assets from chipmaker and cloud infrastructure company Groq.
In a blog post announcing the deal, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that acquiring Hugging Face will enable the chipmaker to move beyond hardware and further up the A.I. stack.
Huang added that Hugging Face will “remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem” and that Nvidia will expand access to A.I. for developers and institutions worldwide.
Analysts were quick to say that Hugging Face marks a big bet by Nvidia on a popular A.I. platform as the company evolves beyond developing microchips and processors.
Hugging Face is a central platform and community hub for artificial intelligence and machine learning. It hosts over a million pre-trained machine learning models for tasks such as text generation, image creation, translation, and audio processing.
Earlier this year, Hugging Face was at the centre of a hacking scandal that raised concerns about the rapid growth of powerful A.I. models and tools.
Hugging Face blamed engineering mistakes for the cyberattack said that it employed help from Nvidia to resolve the incident.
NVDA stock has risen 32% over the last 12 months to trade at $224.41 U.S. per share.
