What is Nvidia buying for $13 billion these days? Greater control over what AI is built on and what it runs on.
Business Insider reported on Wednesday that the chip giant had arrived talks to take over Hugging Facethat hosts open-source AI models. That’s in line with Nvidia’s strategy lately, as it has been beating the drum open source AI – models that everyone can use and build on.
Open models could prevent a future dominated by giants like OpenAI and Anthropic, both of which are creating closed, proprietary models. If top AI labs dominate the models used and build their own chips to run them – like OpenAI does it with Jalapeño – they could eventually take Nvidia out.
“Open source is an important counterbalance to closed platforms like OpenAI and Anthropic,” said Brad Gastwirth, global head of research and market intelligence at Circular Technology. “The more AI development remains open and fragmented across many models and developers, the more opportunities Nvidia has to remain the underlying infrastructure provider.”
There is also a more immediate payoff: selling more chips. Developers using Hugging Face models must decide what hardware and software they run on, and owning the hub could give Nvidia more influence over their choices.
Neither Nvidia nor Hugging Face immediately responded to requests for comment from Business Insider.
Nvidia could gain more control over open-source AI
Nvidia is circling Hugging face for years.
It closed on a $235 million funding round in 2023 and distributes its own family of open models, Nemotron, on Hugging Face. Last year, Nvidia proposed a $500 million investment in Hugging Face at a $7 billion valuation, which the startup rejected, the Financial Times reported.
Hugging Face said at the time that it did not want any single investor to exert too much influence. That’s because one of its features is its openness, with models running on competing chips and cloud companies including AMD and Google.
That makes a potential takeover of Nvidia a striking turnaround, and it creates a difficult balance.
“The biggest risk is neutrality,” Gastwirth said. “Hugging Face has a lot of value because developers see it as an open platform. Nvidia should be careful not to undermine that.”
While Nvidia could gain more control over Hugging Face, it may have to use that control sparingly to maintain the openness that makes the startup so valuable.
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