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Hugging Face started in 2016 when three French entrepreneurs living in New York City decided to name their company after the 🤗 emoji. What began as a small team has grown into a major hub where people who work with artificial intelligence share and download AI models—essentially, blueprints that AI systems use to learn and operate. Now, Nvidia, the powerful computer chip company that powers much of the AI industry, is buying it for $12.93 billion.
The deal matters because Nvidia is nervous. Big tech companies like OpenAI, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta—who have been Nvidia's best customers—are now building their own computer chips to reduce how much they depend on Nvidia. By owning Hugging Face, Nvidia is betting it can make money from open-weight AI models, which are AI systems anyone can freely use and study. Hugging Face currently has 18 million individual users and 200,000 business clients, and Nvidia says it wants to help grow that to 100 million AI builders in the coming years.
However, not everyone is celebrating. People who created the AI models posted on Hugging Face haven't made any money from their work, even though their models get downloaded millions of times. One model creator told Fortune magazine: "If I got a dollar for every download of Dolphin [my model], I'd be rich." Meanwhile, Hugging Face did turn down a smaller deal from Nvidia just last year—Nvidia had offered $500 million but wanted too much control—so the question remains: why accept now?