Nvidia agrees to buy Hugging Face for US$12.9 billion: Report

Nvidia has agreed to buy AI platform Hugging Face for US$12.9 billion, The Information reported on Wednesday (Aug 26), citing a person with knowledge of the deal.

The chipmaker and New York-based Hugging Face, which hosts open-source large language models and datasets, did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment outside regular business hours.

Nvidia was among the backers, alongside Salesforce and Alphabet's Google, that backed Hugging Face in a US$235 million funding round in 2023 that valued the company at US$4.5 billion.

The Financial Times reported in January that Hugging Face last year rejected a US$500 million investment offer from Nvidia that would have valued it at US$7 billion.

Nvidia on Wednesday forecast a 70 per cent jump in revenue next fiscal year, underscoring unabated demand for AI computing. Nvidia also said it has US$18 billion committed to equity investments for the rest of the 2027 fiscal year.

In July, Hugging Face's infrastructure was compromised when some OpenAI models went rogue during a security test and triggered a hack.