US chipmaker NVIDIA has agreed to acquire artificial intelligence developer platform Hugging Face for around $12.9 billion, its founder and CEO announced on Thursday.
"I’m excited to announce that NVIDIA has agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12,930,300,000," Jensen Huang said in a statement.
Noting that more than 18 million developers, researchers and creators use Hugging Face to share more than three million models, 500,000 datasets and one million applications, Huang said more than 200,000 companies use the platform to discover, evaluate, customise and deploy AI.
"Together, we will scale Hugging Face’s platform, strengthen its infrastructure and expand access to AI for developers and institutions worldwide," he added.
Huang also underscored that Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem, adding NVIDIA compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face.
Hugging Face is a central hub and open-source platform that hosts artificial intelligence and machine learning models, datasets, and interactive web demos. It is similar to GitHub, but instead of general software code, it stores machine learning assets.
