Huang Renxun responds to the $1.29 billion acquisition of Hugging Face: Not to put AI in NVIDIA

NVIDIA announced on September 3 that it has agreed to acquire the open-source AI platform Hugging Face for $12.9303 billion (approximately 87.092 billion Chinese yuan). Huang Renxun later explained the reasons for the acquisition in a blog post.

The Home of 18 Million Developers, NVIDIA is the Largest Contributor

Huang Renxun stated that Hugging Face is an important "home" for the open model developer community, with more than 18 million developers, researchers, and creators sharing over 300,000 models, 50,000 datasets, and 100,000 applications on the platform. More than 200,000 companies use it to find, evaluate, customize, and deploy AI. He also revealed that NVIDIA itself is the largest contributor of open models and data to Hugging Face, with contributions continuing to grow. NVIDIA has already released more than 500 models and 250 open datasets on the platform.

Huang Renxun said he hopes to expand Hugging Face's open AI platform to an unprecedented scale by leveraging NVIDIA's infrastructure, engineering capabilities, and global reach. He also promised that Hugging Face will maintain its open platform nature and continue to support various open-source and open-weight models, as well as multi-cloud and multi-accelerator environments.

Commitment to No "Closed Entry," Open Weights Benefit More Organizations

Huang Renxun pointed out that open weights allow startups, companies, universities, and public institutions to use advanced AI capabilities without training models from scratch, helping to distribute AI leadership among more companies, organizations, and communities. Open models can also help organizations choose suitable models for different tasks, making AI faster available in real-world scenarios such as factories, hospitals, farms, classrooms, and small and medium-sized enterprises.

After this acquisition, NVIDIA will help improve the reliability, security, model evaluation, inference, and deployment capabilities of the Hugging Face platform. Regarding this planned acquisition, Huang Renxun emphasized that Hugging Face will not become a closed entry point serving only NVIDIA hardware, but instead, through NVIDIA's scaling capabilities, further enhance the open AI ecosystem.