Nvidia buys Hugging Face for nearly $13 billion

Hugging Face started as a free place to share AI experiments. On Thursday, Nvidia agreed to buy it for close to $13 billion. That's Nvidia's second-biggest deal ever. It hands the chip giant one of AI's most-used tools: the site where developers download, test, and swap AI models. All three Hugging Face founders are joining Nvidia too.

Nvidia already sells the chips nearly every AI company trains on. Now it also owns a hub sitting between those companies and the models they build. That's an odd position for a supposedly neutral chipmaker. Rivals like AMD and Google build their own AI chips, and their engineers rely on Hugging Face too. Nvidia says the site will stay open, and keep working the same way no matter whose hardware a developer uses. Competitors have no way to enforce that promise beyond trusting it.

Keep reading — what to watch

Will Hugging Face still feel neutral in a year? The site earned trust by staying independent from Big Tech. Its founders reportedly held out until Nvidia agreed to preserve that. Watch what happens to a rival's model, or a small AI lab's. If either one starts sliding down the list, that's the sign the promise didn't hold.