NVIDIA is reportedly seeking to acquire Hugging Face, with the aim of controlling the gateway through which developers choose the models they run. The amount is reportedly approximately $12.9 billion based on media reports, and no agreement has yet been signed.
NVIDIA was reported to be considering an acquisition of Hugging Face for approximately $12.9 billion. No formal agreement has been reported as signed, and the source is said to be a single person familiar with the matter; the amount is a figure reported by multiple news organizations.
Hugging Face operates a hub where developers can publish and obtain public models, with the number of public model repositories reaching 2.96 million. At the same time, actual downloads are concentrated among a limited group of models, and the high usage of models derived from Qwen has been noted.
The company's annual revenue is approximately $15 million (approximately ¥24 billion), making the $12.9 billion acquisition price roughly 860 times that amount. Its valuation in a previous funding round was $4.5 billion, but the article suggests that the acquisition price could be substantially higher than that level.
If the acquisition is completed, NVIDIA would gain the gateway that determines which models developers run, and it has been suggested that this could give the company a degree of influence over the flow of computing demand in the future.