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Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/nvidia-agrees-buy-open-source-model-repository-hugging-face-12-9-billion?utm_campaign=article_email&utm_content=article-17723 https://www.theinformation.com/articles/nvidia-agrees-buy-op... (paywalled)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/24/hugging-face-reportedly-in-talks-to-be-acquired-for-13b/ https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/24/hugging-face-reportedly-in...
- bensyverson 3mo agoI hope they're good stewards. This reminds me of the Microsoft GitHub acquisition in terms of the importance to the broader community.
- impulser_ 3mo agoI think they will be, Nvidia has released open source model that also included the data it was trained on. I think they are the only ones that have done that.
- arlcode 3mo agoHanding out digging spots if you are the shovel manufacturer sounds reasonable.
- bensyverson 3mo agoAs long as the spots continue to be compatible with shovels from other shovel manufacturers
- esalman 3mo agoAs someone who've played video games and obsessed over graphics cards long before this all started, don't get your hopes up.
- diabllicseagull 3mo agoas gamers, we got burnt by nvidia way too many times. I'm still holding grudge over shutting down 3dfx.
- isatty 3mo agoNvidia is indeed a terrible company when it comes to open source, etc. however, as someone who has been gaming on desktop hardware since the 6xxx card days, Nvidia hardware has always worked. I switched to Linux full time since the 2XX days (maybe it was the 280 gtx?) and never had a lot of the problems everyone else got on Linux (using only the closed source drivers).
- jacquesm 3mo agoLikewise, their hardware has been rock solid and very performant for me. I bought most of my current setup second hand and they've been going strong for years now.
- esalman 3mo agoNVIDIA introduced programs like The Way It's Meant to be Played, optimizing major game titles specifically for NVIDIA architecture, which made competitions like AMD cards underperform in critical releases. I'm old enough to remember.
- TiredOfLife 3mo agoAmd and Intel have the same programs.
- esalman 3mo agoBut they don't/didn't have the same level of market share as Nvidia, particularly in the PC gaming market. Nvidia had 65%-85% market share, and still worked with game studios to make sure their competitions failed. That's the opposite of good stewardship that's all I'm saying.
- alansaber 3mo agoGreat for Nvidia. Bad for the rest of us. Oh well, so much for hugging face.
- alpineman 3mo agoEU regulators...wake up!
- szszrk 3mo agoThey absolutely should, but what would be their impact on American companies buying each other out?
- alpineman 3mo agoIf they want to operate in the EU, quite a lot. See cases against Microsoft, Apple for example.
- szszrk 3mo agoOK, can you provide specific cases/articles about it? I'm curious what can EU do with a merger of companies that are not legal identities within EU. It's different for their local counterparts, but the original companies?
- alpineman 3mo agoMicrosoft/Activision Blizzard was tough for Microsoft in the EU despite them both being US companies, because they affected European consumers.
- zoobab 3mo agoLet's file an antitrust complain. Not just on this HF acquisition, but on the whole ecosystem monopoly.
- ahartmetz 3mo agoI also see this as an antitrust case, but to see that, you need to be much more up to date on technology than anyone who decides such things. It's comparable to the biggest bank buying the biggest ratings agency.
- Danox 2mo ago
- Laurel1234 3mo ago[dead]
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- maskbreak 3mo ago[flagged]
- ewwefwef 3mo agochina have different sites for models storage.
- SlightlyLeftPad 3mo agoWill the FTC block this one? Probably not..for money reasons.
- Avicebron 3mo agotldr: the marketplace for opensource models became wide open
- freelanddev 3mo agothe title of this post is misleading… “in talks” != not “agrees”
- semiquaver 3mo agoIt’s not misleading according to the The Information piece (second link) > Nvidia Agrees to Buy Open Source Model Repository Hugging Face For $12.9 Billion
- dang 3mo agoThe story is in an intermediate state right now, but as semiquaver points out, The Information is reporting it as fact. Since their reporting tends to be as reliable as it is hardwalled, we went with their claim in the title.
- thenthenthen 3mo agoI agree, “agree” is super weird
- aizk 3mo agoFix your title it's not finalized yet!
- girfan 3mo agoAccording to The Information, it seem it's finalized? https://www.theinformation.com/articles/nvidia-agrees-buy-open-source-model-repository-hugging-face-12-9-billion?utm_campaign=article_email&utm_content=article-17723 https://www.theinformation.com/articles/nvidia-agrees-buy-op...
- underdeserver 3mo agoThen use that as the link. Everything I can find online is referring to this one source. That doesn't tell me if it's happening or not.
- CurbStomper 3mo ago[dead]
- sbinnee 3mo agoThis is huge!
- Gigachad 3mo agoWhat is the business model of hugging face? My understanding was they were basically just a file hosting platform.
- dylan604 3mo agoIsn't this pretty much the model for any tech company? Rush to get MVP released, stoke the hype, cash in on FOMO.
- RachelF 3mo agoI guess we may have to start paying to download models. Or perhaps they will start throttling downloads for free users. I don't know what they business case is, it might be to shut them down: I suspect good free models on local hardware is a threat to Nvidia's investments in OpenAI/Anthropic.
- esseph 3mo agoMaybe they're trying to see how big the market actually is before considering shutting it down, maybe or getting lawyers and politicians to try and outlaw or restrict open models if they see a big enough opportunity.
- sebmellen 3mo agoI see the opposite — NVIDIA is aiming to commoditize the model layer and push open models that are tuned to run on NVIDIA hardware.
- toyg 3mo agoSo much this. It's like Apple buying Shazam or any other software company, they do it to bring value to their hardware platform.
- a_wild_dandan 3mo agoMaybe everyone will migrate to Hugging Bay for downloading models via torrent?
- 3mo ago
- jadar 3mo agoHold on, these say no deal has been reached yet.
- gizajob 3mo agowhoa
- user- 3mo agoIts becoming impossible to track all the acquisitions.
- riddley 3mo agoAnyone old enough to remember anti trust laws or even just laws?
- newsclues 3mo agoThe AI judge doesn’t have that feature yet
- Pxtl 3mo agoLaws are for poor people
- swyx 3mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- Madmallard 3mo agowhat? why? seems pretty apt
- livinglist 3mo agoI mean you can easily write a browser plugin using AI to do that, there might already have been one.
- dang 3mo agoPlease don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News. No doubt you have the nucleus of a substantive comment here, but that's not enough. If you only post the shallowest top stratum of what you're thinking, other people do the same, and then we get "Laws are for poor people" and endless descending repetition. The whole point of this site is to try for something other than that. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html p.s. Also, please don't be snarky on HN. That's also in the guidelines.
- Danox 3mo ago
- novia 3mo agoum um um um do we want nvidia to be on the same network as hugging face given the recent incidents?
- logicallee 3mo agocould you elaborate on what happened?
- alashow 3mo agohttps://openai.com/index/hugging-face-incident-and-the-road-ahead/ https://openai.com/index/hugging-face-incident-and-the-road-...
- vmg12 3mo agoThe companies have aligned incentives so I don't think this is a terrible acquisition for customers.
- rileymat2 3mo agoVertically integrated monopolies naturally have aligned in incentives for themselves, which allows more capture which turns out bad for customers. Whether it is a monopoly is an open question.
- vmg12 3mo agoThis isn't vertical integration. This is a commoditize your complements play and that does benefit customers. Nvidia benefits from supporting the open model ecosystem, if models are a commodity the gpus become what's scarce.
- tehbeard 3mo agoSomeone with financial / decision making weight their is going to ask why they are commoditizing models that run on "others" GPUs .... Since doing that makes their gpus less of the scarce resource..
- rileymat2 3mo agoOh, I totally agree, this alone is not vertical integration, but can be a path too it, long term being able to vertically integrate undercutting others that would be on top of the chain then retracting the open model.
- lotsofpulp 3mo ago>Vertically integrated monopolies naturally have aligned in incentives for themselves, which allows more capture which turns out bad for customers. Apple's devices have resulted in a great increase in quality of life for myself and family members who used to waste a lot of time with Windows drivers/BSODs/random updates/malware/etc. It's been almost 20 years, and it's turned out OK.
- 3mo ago
- browningstreet 3mo agoI’ve asked ChatGPT etc a few times how Hugging Face makes money. Never quite got to understanding . Good for them.
- 0gs 3mo agoGemini did a good job of explaining it. fwiw, it may have helped that i accused Gemini of leading me to a "scam site" like "mega dot com"
- what 3mo agoYou could just go to their website and look at the pricing pages? Why are you asking an LLM?
- browningstreet 3mo agoBecause I never ever see anyone talking about using it, except for occasional reference to weights.
- louwrentius 3mo agoI really wonder why Nvidia would do this.
- keyle 3mo agoOwning the roots, the trunk, the branches and the tip of the leafs.
- Ekaros 3mo agoKeep alive the on-prem hardware sales? Not as big part likely but still something good to have. On-prem hardware needs models to be available to be useful. So pushing those could sell more on-prem hardware.
- fsuts 3mo agoAi companies are making their own chips, Apple unified and other unified ram solutions also a threat Nvidia is making tons of money by selling GPUs at a very high profit margin. They will do anything to remain dominant
- a96 3mo agoWhy would the most rich and evil company on the field want to own a practical monopoly?
- rjzzleep 3mo agoI'm puzzled by the reactions. This is not a good thing. Yes, they're releasing more open source code and models, but they do it BECAUSE OF pressure from the community and other open source projects. But Nvidia is a terrible open source and consumer company. They gatekeep a lot and oftentimes it's only open source in name. Outside contributions are often slow-walked or rejected if they don't align with business incentives , and leadership is retained 100% in a couple of people from a certain country.
- RachelF 3mo agoLinus Torvalds: 'Nvidia has been the single worst company we've ever dealt with' His other comments on Nvidia often contain expletives.
- bigyabai 3mo agoIn fairness, most of those comments were made before Nvidia capitulated in the EGLStream war and released open kernel modules.
- jacquesm 3mo agoLinus isn't wrong but at the same time NV has shipped more compute than AMD and Intel combined to consumers. The kind of performance I get out of a modest outlay never ceases to amaze me.
- nik282000 3mo agoSales volume has no correlation with how good a company is for an ecosystem. See Microsoft, Adobe, Apple, Sony, and so on.
- jacquesm 3mo agoNV is a very different beast from all of those. I have yet to regret buying any of their products and I wouldn't touch your list with a stolen 10' pole.
- 3mo ago
- manlymuppet 3mo agoPotentially horrible for monopoly reasons, but if other big acquisitions in the AI era teach us anything, developers are about to get a whole lot of free and discounted trial credits. That’s at least a plus. I will happily burn through as much VC money as they will give me to tinker with my projects.
- abixb 3mo agoYes. Great for devs, for a while. Awful for overall competition and industry's health. I think the federal antitrust regulators are asleep. Edit: antitrust regulators' job has just begun -- we'll see how this deal gets adjudicated by the FTC (if at all).
- herpdyderp 3mo agoExcept for during Biden, they've been asleep for almost 50 years.
- petterroea 3mo agoI have never seen an acquisition be good for the users. I struggle to believe this one will be different
- bulbar 3mo agoAcquisition of GitHub let to increased downtimes, but also to unlimited private repos for the free tier.
- unsungNovelty 3mo ago... Which gitlab already had before github. And still does.
- petterroea 3mo agoThe unlimited private repos for free tier would have happened anyways. You have to remember that this was around the time people were jumping ship from GitHub exactly because they didn't offer private repos for free. It was something many wanted, and they were actively seeking out other places that would give it to them.
- bulbar 3mo agoI'm not convinced that's the case. GitHub was like that forever, they were well established and the change happened not long after Microsoft bought them. There was no global shift to gitlab instances or Atlassian as far as I am aware. You can dislike an entity or an action and still acknowledge it also had some positive effects.
- lopis 3mo agoOverall GitHub still got significantly worse since the acquisition. Downtime was essentially zero before.
- dyauspitr 3mo agoUsage was 5% of what it is now before.
- manlymuppet 3mo agoWhat’s with all the big acquisitions recently? Is it advantageous for some reason to announce all of this stuff now?
- brazukadev 3mo agoThe VC capital for AI is probably drying up. Now the question is: who will buy OpenAI and Anthropic?
- vasco 3mo agoThe public
- downrightmike 3mo agoNot if they can't indefinitely contain ram and SSD procurement. And they can't and the Market already showed with specex that they are unwilling to float these fly by night outrageous 'investments' onto institutional holders. Institutional holders mass revolted at spacex getting into the basket. AI costs more than having people do the work. Q2 CFO reaction proved that.
- m4rtink 3mo agoNo, its just the final stage of the bubble before it all comes crashing down. :)
- abjhn 3mo ago[dead]
- sourdecor 3mo agoWhat does Linus’s hatred of NVidia drivers imply for this situation?
- Danox 3mo agoThe other hater is Apple, Linus’s isn’t alone…
- andy99 3mo agoThe open weights AI ecosystem is way too concentrated with HF. That said, it was clear they were going to either get bought or aggressively monetized at some point, Nvidia seems like it could be one of the more aligned acquirers. I do worry about any sort of crowding out or downplaying non Nvidia-relevant quants, and about changing rules to crack down on models or datasets that for one reason or another “don’t align with their corporate values” - uncensored etc. Someone mentioned Microsoft and GitHub, they appear to me anyway to have been very hands off, I hope it’s the same model.
- zb3 3mo agoWe also have modelscope.cn, I'm sure that one won't get acquired
- alightsoul 3mo agoIt's already part of Alibaba, which has its own incentives. So does kaggle with Google. Civitai is neutral but it is mostly nsfw even though they don't show it outright. Torrenting is the Best way
- jacquesm 3mo agoThere are always torrents, which would seem to be a fine way to distribute models.
- maxlin 3mo agoBig Wolf buying the sheep farm. Nice
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- binarymax 3mo agoWell congrats to Clem and the team. I remember when huggingface was doing things like coreference resolution models on spacy. I hope nvidia does right by the community. Edit to add: $13B should cover the S3 egress fees for a couple months :D
- kfse 3mo agoThe $13b doesn't go to hugging face's bank acct to pay for anything like S3 egress fees... It go to hugging face's owners' Bank accounts for them to do anything else. New cohorts of billionaires and centi millionaires getting minted.
- Symbiote 3mo ago> billionaires and centi millionaires I think you mean hecto-millionaires.
- adammarples 3mo agoI think you mean mibionaires
- zuminator 3mo agoDecitrillionaires
- sota_pop 3mo agoI think you mean Dodecahedrillionaires
- alasano 3mo agoI think you mean people whose net worth, expressed in millinaires, exceeds 10^11
- theideaofcoffee 3mo agoI think he was telling something called a joke. It's funny because S3 is expensive and they just got some money.
- missingpackage 3mo agoNvidia has already a good free offer with Nim and a lot of compute power available. Plus, they obviously have interest in spreading open models culture.
- swayson 3mo agoJust like that they lost their ethos. AI oligarchy in the US is now cemented.
- swayson 3mo agoHuggingface sold out. Sad day. All the good companies lose their 'dont do evil' clause as soon as they make bank
- onlyrealcuzzo 3mo agoYou've sold out when you became VC Funded... It's just a matter of how long the free punch lasts.
- tofuahdude 3mo agoWhat, are you expecting them to just work for good vibes?
- herpdyderp 3mo agoTo be fair, this is the best thing that can happen for the founders. I don't blame them.
- stuxnet79 3mo agoIt was either they (literally) sell out or enshittify. Choose your poison. Hosting and running LLMs is an expensive business to be in. There wasn't ever going to be a good ending to this story. The original investors need to be made whole.
- esjeon 3mo agoObviously, NVIDIA is trying to own the AI development chain. Owning HF -- the discovery and distribution channel -- is one thing, but I think the biggest threat vector is the privileged access to HF platform data, that includes HW survey info and model download pattern. This can be a borderline anti-trust case.
- Fordec 3mo agoIf the acquisitions of late tell us anything at all, it's that Nvidia wants to be a vertical AI company, not a hardware or gaming company.
- 34679 2mo agoThere's a small chance this could be signalling a pivot, or at least posturing for a possible future pivot. If they see the mega-datacenter market drying up or slowing down, they may opt for a future in hardware targeted to the individual or smaller teams. In other words, as soon as the VC money for centralized AI dries up, they start selling hardware that doesn't require VC-levels of money to buy.
- siliconpotato 3mo agoAlso they bought the company which develops the open source slurm scheduler which is the primary and defacto standard HPC scheduler on the market. Bit of a concern to say the least
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- Shocka1 3mo agoThis brings back memories of the CVS/Aetna merger for me, which ended up going through of course. Hopefully the anti-trust enforcers have some experts in the ML/AI pipeline, but I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't bat an eye at this one. Hope I'm proved wrong though.
- bugglebeetle 3mo ago
- janalsncm 3mo agoThey were already pretty vocal about it, but this makes Nvidia pretty much the de facto face of open weight models. As battle lines get drawn over duopoly vs. open weight it’ll be interesting to see what Nvidia does. They definitely want a piece of more of the stack especially as Huawei chips become more and more of an alternative to cuda.
- alightsoul 3mo agoAlibaba already has modelscope and their own chips, and qwen models. Nvidia is doing the same with chips, huggingface and nemotron models
- NDlurker 3mo agoOh jeez
- alberth 3mo agoI wonder if OpenRouter being acquired was a catalyst for this deal.
- stackghost 3mo agoHuggingFace offers abliterated/uncensored models, which would seem to run contrary to the "AI is too powerful for regular people" narrative that the big players are pushing. My primary concern is that Nvidia will bow to the pressure and restrict abliterated/uncensored models on HF.
- jacquesm 3mo agoThat is a very good point. I will set aside some storage and download those models that I think are most at risk from a corporate clean-up action.
- anon291 3mo agoI don't think nvda has ever pushed the idea that ai is too powerful for regular people. That's the anthropics and openais of the world.
- twobitshifter 3mo agoOP said they will bow to pressure, which just means that governments will be able to control nv and get them to ban the obliterated models, implement ’safety’ controls on all uploaded models.
- discodave 3mo agoPretty sure Nvidias dream is that OpenAI and Anthropic get into a hacking war using Nvidia cards. The problem for them is that the leading provider of training and inference is actually AWS...
- lgl 3mo agoYes, this is a real possibility imho. Having Nvidia behind HF will now probably have a bunch of litigious entities salivating to sue them for not only allowing, but also distributing uncensored AI models that will then be used for deepfakes, porn, spam, scam, hacking, etc. Sure that could have also been done to HF before, but I'm thinking Nvidia is a much juicier target. Should also now be much easier for the government to just eventually force NVidia to restrict access to Chinese open models seeing as it will now become an American company that needs to obey to American law and we all know how American AI companies are lobbying for exactly that.
- LowTechHN 3mo ago[dead]
- OutlawHusbando 3mo agoI'm more worry than positive tbh.
- bizstrategy10 3mo ago[dead]
- killerdog10 3mo ago[dead]
- brainless 3mo agoHF is the default platform to find models. Not just ones published by big labs but also a lot of the distilled or fine-tuned versions, etc. If Nvidia buying HF makes it tough for all the diverse models on HF, then what are some alternatives? It seems models are the best things to be available on a Torrent platform? Of course HF is much more than just the files but perhaps the metadata can be separate and hosted on multiple community platforms.
- ekianjo 3mo ago> what are some alternatives good old torrents
- pwython 3mo agoThere's over 3 million models on HuggingFace. So many quants. I'd imagine less than 0.5% would actually be seeded.
- chorizo 3mo agoIf HF didn’t exist, model releases would likely have been on torrents like Linux iso’s back in the day.
- swozey 3mo agoI'd honestly prefer that. I'm usually on 5g if not 4g and pulling models is an absolute nightmare when I basically have to use HF and even with a token getting throttled. Although I have a pretty unique use case. Pulling wads of 5gb tensor files over cellular is painful.
- brainless 3mo agoI am on the same boat, I live in a small Himalayan village. I have 2x5G based devices and one Wireless bridge (Ubiquiti LiteBeam M5) for a local broadband. Generally I get 50 Mbps, sometimes up to 100 Mbps
- GeertB 3mo agoNvidia's been pretty terrible for open source / free software. No need to quote Linus Torvalds here. They want to control what runs on their hardware. They want to you write code against their proprietary drivers and APIs, not directly against the hardware (which these days of course also contains plenty of software, but still). Don't expect things to go differently this time around. Nvidia wants control over the software stack. Acquiring HF fits in perfectly. The play is long term.
- rvz 3mo agoNvidia has hardly open sourced the nvcc compiler, yet no-one here is complaining about why it is closed source. Modular on the other hand creates the Mojo compiler gets criticised for not open sourcing it immediately and now once they do, no-one cares anymore. Huggingface was not just a target for open source, but as a force to have open weight models run better on Nvidia against the rest.
- paufernandez 3mo agoI'm still rooting for Modular, though.
- silisili 3mo agoI assume it's because nvidia is a hardware company that produces world class hardware, and it's a compiler to target that. Whereas mojo is a general purpose language, and we're absolutely spoiled for choice on modern languages with open source compilers. I'm not saying it's fair or right, I still think mojo is neat, but isn't exactly comparing apples to apples.
- rvz 3mo agoWe can stop with these weak excuses since AMD and Intel have done more for open source than Nvidia has, including their GPU drivers for Linux. Nvidia on the other hand has not and the best they have done is a bunch of closed-source blobs which they do more closed source releases than the rest. Mojo is open source and targets all GPU architectures for their compiler regardless of the vendor and nvcc targets their own (and both that and CUDA are closed source). So this is directly an apples to apples comparison.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- __mharrison__ 3mo agoThe lowest hanging fruit that hf could offer is community monitored commands for running local models. Right now it is a pain to find the correct incantation.
- kpw94 3mo agoRemember just 6 months ago that "Ggml.ai joins Hugging Face to ensure the long-term progress of Local AI" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47088037 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47088037) (Ggml.ai is llama.cpp.) Curious if the “I consider HuggingFace more "Open AI" than OpenAI” sentiment in that top comment will still apply with NVIDIA as the boss now...
- make3 3mo agoNVidia has reasonable incentives to keep things open indefinitely, it wants people to use it's GPUs
- noosphr 3mo agoIssue is that llama.cpp is the best way to run models on hardware that isn't nvidias.
- alightsoul 3mo agoExcept when they have less than 16 gb of ram?
- dannyw 3mo agoA lot of llama.cpp contributions come from the community and ecosystem, like Unsloth. If something goes awry, I fully expect lots of forks.
- MrDrMcCoy 3mo agoThere already are a lot of forks for things they decline to implement. TurboQuant, ROCmFPX, and more. I need to set up an agent that will loop on merging them.
- swozey 3mo agoIt'd be really nice if I could use my egpu 4090 on my macbook pro..
- etempleton 3mo agoI am just curious, and I genuinely want to know, how is a 150 million a year in revenue company worth 13 billion dollars?
- rvz 3mo agoSame reason why GitHub was acquired for $7.5B at $250 million ARR which is 30x revenues: VCs could not see any other reason to raise more money and Huggingface was not growing as fast as they thought to justify the valuation or the next fundraise. So they might as well get Nvidia to save them from the VCs pressurizing them.
- Jonathanvw 3mo agoThat doesn't make much sense to me. Companies don't just buy companies for absurd multiples out of the niceness of their heart. In the case of GitHub, it was likely for data reasons + wanting to own where developers do work (VScode + Github). In the case of HuggingFace, honestly not sure as I'm not familiar enough with their business. But I can assure you that Nvidia didn't buy them for 13 billion cause HuggingFace were desperate. When you're desperate, you sell for less not more.
- bsder 3mo ago> But I can assure you that Nvidia didn't buy them for 13 billion cause HuggingFace were desperate. From Nvidia's side? You get to keep the shell game of where your money and hardware are going spinning on the table for a little longer. If the party stops, Nvidia loses a zero right off their valuation instantly. And, as a side benefit, you get to place your thumb on the scale of the open-weight hosting ecosystem. And maybe even fund a Chinese Anthropic or OpenAI at a discount. OpenAI just popped out an inference ASIC. Google is on their 8th generation of TPU. Graviton is out from Amazon. The hosting companies want Nvidia out of their finances. Full stop. Nvidia has to do something, or it's going to get swept away.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- killerdog10 3mo agoSo is the next step to just basically create a cloud business. they basically own chips - data centers - discovery etc?
- killerdog10 3mo ago[dead]
- system2 3mo agoI wanted to pray for AMD to attack somehow but then I remembered their owner CEO's are cousins. Should we pray for Chinese GPUs?
- zx8080 3mo agoThat's a great news for a few rich wallets and bad for all of us.
- seanmcdirmid 3mo agoNo, what? Did they just do this to make Chinese models harder to acquire outside of China?
- alightsoul 3mo agoThey will just download them from modelscope
- Conol_ai 3mo agoThe more interesting is HF turned down a $500M Nvidia investment late last year at a $7B valuation, after passing on a $235M round in 2023 at $4.5B — going from "we don't want a dominant investor" to a $13B full acquisition in under a year is quite the reversal.
- transitorykris 3mo agoWell, if they didn't want a dominant investor, they didn't get one, they got acquired.
- alansaber 3mo agoSounds like it was just too much money for the stakeholders to refuse
- dingdongditchme 3mo agoYea, my bet is that there is quite a long list of money bags sitting behind the leadership team that will weigh in if the offer is juicy enough.
- Maxious 3mo agoDouble or nothing
- moralestapia 3mo agoSeems the opposite of a reversal to me. Reversal would be "valued at 7B then valued at nothing", this is more like "nah, we want more" then "nah, we want more" then "yes, that's what we want :)".
- altmanaltman 3mo agoI don't think they passed on the 4.5 billion. They still raised it in 2023 with investors like Alphabet etc. They turned Nvidia *earlier this year* for the $7 billion valuation deal. It makes sense if they were angling for an acquisition. This is the article you are referring to is this but your facts are wrong: https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/24/hugging-face-reportedly-in-talks-to-be-acquired-for-13b/ https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/24/hugging-face-reportedly-in...
- paaloeye 3mo agonvidia antitrust incoming
- akulbe 3mo agoLike some other folks, I wonder whether this will be a good thing, or a bad thing. I feel like if Nvidia ends up turning into a bad actor, in terms of restricting/censoring models... another HF will spring up.
- astudentinearth 3mo agoLooks like owning the hardware wasn't enough and they want to own the ecosystem as well
- numberwan9 3mo agoI really hope they retain and pay Georgi Gerganov. We are toast without ggml.
- Fervicus 3mo agoThis is the world we live in now. 3-4 megacorps owning everything in every major product category - eyewear, cosmetic, consumer goods, media, tech; you name it.
- alightsoul 3mo agoWe need small companies worldwide, developing the things huggingface does. The us china and Europe dominate while the rest of the world sits by idly. Torrent and seed ai models. It's not piracy
- unglaublich 3mo agoIf you can't beat them, buy them. Hallmark of late-stage capitalism.
- fsuts 3mo agoWe live in now? Has always been this way. Big companies always seek to buy fast growing startups and unfortunately the founders of these startups mostly take the money.
- sumedh 2mo ago> Big companies always seek to buy fast growing startups Didnt the US go through a antitrust phase phase where they ordered big companies to be broken up.
- peri-cl 3mo agoI remember when people realized gaming cards could be used for general compute (GPGPU) on certain types of parallel numeric work. It was a very cool thing for many types of hackers and science and engineering students and NVIDIA went far out of their way to ensure we could never buy it. The optimal market strategy there (as in a lot of places) wasn't "sell as much as you can". There's often a superior strategy, when (as with HPC) you have minority industry customers who are very rich and have low price sensitivity. It's to raise the price to what those special customers are willing to pay, and to drop everyone else. What NVIDIA did was to rip out FP64 capability, systematically, from all of their consumer cards. They firewalled off "useful for GPGPU" as a differentiating feature, segmented the market, and astronomically raised the price of what (if you were looking soley at cost-to-manufacture) could have been easily affordable to any ramen student. (It's a more obscure version of the Intel-made-ECC-memory-disappear story). See, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47068890 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47068890 ("15 years of FP64 segmentation, and why the Blackwell Ultra breaks the pattern (nicolasdickenmann.com)")
- RachelF 3mo agoYes, this is ironic - it was the tinkerers using CUDA on cheap graphics cards that made Nvidia stuff useful in constrained academic environments. True about Intel and ECC, but AMD now does similar things, even with their consumer CPUs and chipsets. These three companies now make very sure that consumer products can never canibalize those juicy data center profits - so they make sure to limit what the consumer segment can do.
- curious_ralts 3mo agoThe same is true for the simultaneous NVENC video encoding session limit which is artificially locked for consumer NVIDIA GPUs (see https://github.com/keylase/nvidia-patch https://github.com/keylase/nvidia-patch)
- user00005 3mo agoFor the longest time 10-bit color was only available on their professional cards. All it took was a driver update to unlock it on their consumer cards.
- jauntywundrkind 3mo agoI really wish I'd done better bookmarking back when Nvidia was talking about acquiring ARM. There were all kinds of things coming out saying, if we do this, even though we will be taking over ARM, it will transform us from the inside out. We would become a new different company, that cares about something beyond our own self interest, our own chips. This feels like a similar leap of faith. One that is hard to believe in. Thankfully, I think Nvidia can keep the lights on here & keep this going. I don't think they have to do much, per se. But it felt implausible then to image an Nvidia that gave a shit about anyone else, an Nvidia that actually gave a flying fuck about drivers or upstream Linux or ecosystems that weren't entirely within their own control. Similarly the upper quartile of succes here feels mostly like benevolent neglect. I think we can hope for Nvidia to just not mess up a good thing, for them to understand that this open model open ai universe hinges upon Hugging Face, and for them to pretty please keep caring about the existential risk of the hyper-ai'ers all building their own properietary models on proprietary hardware and leaving Nvidia behind some day, and HF being the hedge against being left behind.
- JohnO4 3mo ago[dead]
- Danox 3mo agoNot good news and in the long run this circular move will fail for them. What are the alternatives?
- gdiamos 3mo agoBest case scenario
- dnnehgf 3mo agostripe buys openrouter. nvidia buys hugging face. everyone on the hunt for the app that will function as hub/broker/search/marketplace for models.
- austinbaggio 3mo agoMonumental implications on OS
- PrimeAli 3mo ago[flagged]
- austinbaggio 3mo agoMonumental implications on OS models. Proper investment in US OS incoming? HF has the best possible distribution to that audience
- heliosAtwork 3mo agoBrilliant replacement of http://build.nvidia.com http://build.nvidia.com to increase developer reach and deployment of nvidia open models!
- moralestapia 3mo agoWow, nice strategic move and price seems a bit low tbh. Good deal.
- jazzpush2 3mo agoNVIDIA had more open-source models on huggingface than any other company. A lot better them than any other frontier lab, tbh.
- tinypieman 3mo agoWe keep talking about EU having to be more present in the AI race, but if the lifecycle of European AI companies is to be bought by US ones, what’s the point?
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- sixdimensional 3mo agoBoy, there sure is a lot of money flying around... First they came for all the dev tooling - uv, Cursor, etc. Now the routers and providers - Open Router, Hugging Face... Who or what is next? And what is the endgame I wonder??
- cmiles8 3mo agoCongrats to the team. I have a strong feeling this will go down in history as one of the last great exists before the bubble bursts. 12-24 months from this acquisition will likely look like a crazy burn of capital and cash.
- asd000hh 3mo agowelcome nvidia :)
- sschueller 3mo agoIs there any cash involved or is this all stock?
- xkbarkar 3mo agoOh no. I use huggingface all the time. Sad news.
- damowangcy 3mo agoThis whole thing made the AI attack on HF even more suspicious...
- seydor 3mo agoGood timing
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- DiabloD3 3mo agoHeh, thats a weird way to announced the death of HuggingFace.
- niutech 2mo agoWhy death? Rather prosperity with a cash injection!
- matesz 3mo agoForgive me for newb question, but why Hugging Face is a thing at all? Couldn't models be simply distributed via torrents? And the whole aggregator thing would come down to indexing magent links published by model providers?
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- raincole 3mo agoWhy is any file hosting service ever a thing at all, when literally any file can simply be distributed via torrents?
- sgt101 3mo agoThere's a herding effect with torrents where popular things are quick to get, unpopular things may be very difficult to get, because the majority of users delete files to save space. I might host 3 or 4 models that I've downloaded recently, but I won't be hosting the 50 or so that I've tried in the last two years.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- debugnik 3mo agoAnd who seeds it? If you're going to pay a host to seed it, they might as well just provide HTTP and let you add them as a web seed to your torrent, which we could be doing already. But if you don't pay a host to seed it, either the host's business model won't play well with torrents, or there's no host and a torrent will rot.
- raincole 3mo ago(It was a retrospective question.)
- rbreve 3mo ago
- roschdal 3mo agoNvidia overpaid for Hugging Face.
- nicman23 3mo agonot even 27b :C
- funlang 3mo ago[flagged]
- skohan 3mo agoThat could be a factor, but the optimistic interpretation would be that they want to support the open ecosystem because it sells more chips. Models are already largely hardware agnostic. It would be pretty hard to put that cat back in the bag. I could imagine them building value-added services on top of HF to advantage Nvidia products (i.e. "run this model on NVIDIA cloud" with one-click), but in this moment it's hard to imagine how they could actively disadvantage models built to run on other platforms.
- Iolaum 3mo agoDo they really need HF for that? Dgx Spark and Strix Halo have very close specs and deliver similar performance. If nvidia makes their stack be more efficient with for example 50% more tockens on similar hardware specs agaist competitors, they don't need HF. My take is that Chinese Labs, though slightly behind on the frontier (due to compute constraints) are on a trajectory to surpass Western labs (this is me speculating, reasons are better ecosystem creation on China's part and potentially better/more data environment). Qwen-3.5-122b was the king in it's category and noone came up with something better, even though many tried like poolside with laguna. Similar with 35b and 27b param models. I think poolside and HF acquisitions show us that nvidia really wants to have competitive models on the prosumer (~100-150b param size) and likely at the 300-500b as well. Together with a hardware to run them that's a good market to be in. And as the recently rumored Xiaomi AI cube shows us (together with gorgon/medusa halo and mac studios), this is a market segment that will have competition.
- Xixi 3mo agoI do think it's a defensive move, but at first order it's defensive against OpenAI, Anthropic, and arguably Google. NVIDIA doesn't want to end up squeezed by those three as they increasingly make their own metal, etc. Ensuring a healthy open-weight model market means ensuring continued demand for metal running in corporate data centers, bypassing any middleman. NVIDIA has a strong interest in a thriving "run your own agents" market. They're actually aligned with Apple here. And in this market, Apple is a real competitor too, with Apple probably more consumer-centric, while NVIDIA probably more enterprise-centric.
- Helldez 3mo ago[dead]
- luciandan 3mo agoMarginally misleading title, article mentioned that "Nvidia has been in talks", not agreed to anything just yet.
- archon810 3mo agohttps://www.theinformation.com/articles/nvidia-agrees-buy-open-source-model-repository-hugging-face-12-9-billion https://www.theinformation.com/articles/nvidia-agrees-buy-op... is a little more definitive but paywalled and still doesn't confirm the other side of the deal - Hugging Face agreeing to the purchase.
- ericel123 3mo agoIs it because OpenAI hacked it? :)
- sgt101 3mo agoDISASTER.
- Gerard22Aug 3mo agoLicensing. (And there is no 2nd Amendment for this one)
- SillyUsername 3mo agoThis isn't a good thing for open source. Nvidia don't share CUDA, don't open source their drivers, don't support capable but older hardware (forget Pascal etc), and generally charge a premium over competitors for hardware. This acquisition will likely solidify this general stance, reduce free compute allowance for a subscription, cap downloads, push advertising, generally favour models that are Nvidia prescribed or have been sponsored, and potentially ban models and datasets that are deemed risky legally (abliterated etc). I see no other reason why Nvidia would want this kind of vertical.
- Iolaum 3mo agoWhile nvidia may not want open source drivers, they want open weight models and this acquisition allows them to keep pushing for that. Commoditize your complement.
- fsuts 3mo agoNvidia don’t fundamentally care about open weight models They care about their high margin GPUs being the dominant platform, otherwise they would have to reduce the price of their gpu/increase vram amounts. Nvidia are making truck loads of money and want it to continue
- Iolaum 3mo agoThey actually do when all their proprietary model customers are also building their own chips.
- _zoltan_ 3mo agoNVIDIA is open source software first for almost everything. You cherry pick a couple of things, but it's not the general sentiment.
- wongarsu 3mo agoTo play devil's advocate: Hugging Face was probably not profitable, and someone has to pay the bills long-term. Nvidia benefits from Hugging Face and the operating costs are pennies to them. For them it makes sense to acquire HF just to keep it running. HF shutting down or self-destructing in the search of profits would be costlier for Nvidia than just buying it now That said, I share all your concerns. The days of a permissive hands-off HF may be numbered
- u1hcw9nx 3mo agoNvidia’s backstop deals are now reaching $130 billion. If neocould sales collapse Nvidia can direct that capacity towards Hugging Face, and recover some of that by selling directly.
- u1hcw9nx 3mo agoReal title: "Nvidia has been in talks to acquire Hugging Face for more than $13 billion"
- phtrivier 3mo agoMe, discovering only now that Hugging Face was founded by French people. We're definitely better at maths than at promotion.
- londons_explore 3mo agoI don't understand the CUDA lockin in 2026... Surely anyone can take any piece of CUDA code and tell some LLM to port it to another platform and keep grinding till performance is identical?
- throwdbaaway 3mo agoSounds like that's what z.ai did to get GLM-5.3-Flash running on Huawei chips.
- code51 3mo agoAlso consider: Nvidia is investing $1 billion in Poolside and paying $6 billion to license its technology and hire most of its engineers. They are the elephant in the room, with their CDS sky-high. Sounds like they are opinionated on the whole AI thing, trying to drive this with open-source models, countering OpenAI using Jalapeno. Looks zero-sum for the players. All the while Google silently planning to get milk from all layers.
- fsuts 3mo agoAI companies seeking to release their own chips and Apple Metal and other unified memory solutions will all eat into Nvidias high margin GPU sales. This can only be bad news, Nvidia didn’t buy hugging face to be good custodians but for business reasons. Let’s hope an alternative platform emerges and takes off.
- 3dedb728-3f77 3mo agoSo, this is the end?
- drumhead 3mo agoLet the enshittification commence.
- m4rtink 3mo agoPets.com, here we go! Just a little bit longer and this whole "AI" insanity might finally be over! :)
- compounding_it 3mo ago> Hugging Face turned down a $500 million investment offer from Nvidia late last year that would have valued it at $7 billion, the Financial Times previously reported. Hugging Face said at the time it did not want a dominant investor that could sway decisions. So instead they sold themselves to the same investor completely ?
- jonathanstrange 3mo agoI mean, it's $500M versus $13B.
- nicce 3mo agoMoney always wins, sadly.
- doe88 3mo agoNvidia for Hugging Face will be even worse than Microsoft for GitHub and we know now how low the bar is here.
- allyant 3mo agoTo be fair Microsoft haven’t done as much integration with their eco system; such as integrating it with Azure DevOps as they could. And long may it continue.
- WhereIsTheTruth 3mo agoYou missed the whole game-ification, enshitification, copilot-ification of github, and open source theft for their AI training episodes Always like that with Microsoft apologists
- allyant 3mo agoOh yes I can totally believe they use public and private repos for their model training. It is surprising they aren’t ahead of the curve for AI coding like Claude code, codex or cursor because of this.
- psma_egeliaa 3mo agoI very much doubt that. Imagine the PR nightmare and potential liability if someone managed to extract from the model credentials in a private repository.
- knocte 3mo agoNot a fan of defending GitHub, but TBH them launching GithubActions made me abandon all other CI platforms I was using in the past, I even left GitLab just for that.
- shric 3mo agoWhat sold you on GitHub Actions? The one 9 of reliability? https://www.githubstatus.com/ https://www.githubstatus.com/
- ismailmaj 3mo agoIt feels really weird to see this when I keep seeing the CEO and CTO of HuggingFace push for local inference to win.
- airspresso 3mo agoNvidia is also pushing for local inference IMHO. They want open models and competition in the model layer, not two big labs controlling all of it.
- DanielHB 3mo agoWhy? If anything it makes complete sense: 1) Local inference means more general GPUs and less ASIC hardware. Only big companies can push ASIC because of the software required, meanwhile nVidia owns cuda which is the standard. 2) Local is less resource-efficient per chip (chips remaining idle much more, meaning more chips required). 3) End-customers have less bargaining power compared to hyper-scalers. Although this might change if customer hardware start behaving more like phones (SoC with everything packed in), but even then the SoC makers will likely still have less bargaining power than hyper-scalers. But then nVidia could potentially make the whole SoC too. So overall local-inference users = higher profit margins for nvidia. They much rather have every business on the globe buy one nvidia rack (or every laptop have a beefy GPU) than have 5-10 hyperscalers buy a few hundred thousand.
- whizzter 3mo agoThe hyperscalers were stable customers buying far more expensive equipment and NVidia has also made a bank selling a lot of auxillary hardware like Mellanox to AI datacenters. But the spending spree is probably coming to an end with the looming IPO's and NVidia is probably trying to hedge their bets by making themselves the sure bet once big-AI stops monopolizing RAM and everyone races to get their local setups.
- oersted 3mo agoYou forget that Nvidia has also been the top consumer GPU player for 20 years.
- unixhero 3mo ago13b Jesus christ
- marsx-dev 3mo ago[dead]
- mrshu 3mo agoI guess this unfortunately means HuggingFace won't be "the first company to go public with an emoji instead of the three-letter ticker" as the cofounders originally intended: "When we started the company, a running joke with my co-founders was that we wanted to be the first company to go public with an emoji instead of the three-letter ticker when you go in the NASDAQ." -- Clem Delangue (https://unsupervisedlearning.substack.com/p/the-future-of-open-vs-closed-source)
- HolyLampshade 3mo agoLittle bit of a “the more you know” moment. Historically NYSE (and AMEX; thought of in this specific context as CTA) had a lock on 1-3 character symbols. NASDAQ (via UTP) had a lock on 4-6 character symbols. For a long time you could tell where something was listed purely by looking at the length of the symbol it traded under. This all changed in the late 2000s or so, so no longer useful information. I honestly would leave the industry if one of the exchanges tried to bend the industry to allow an emoji in a symbol. The communication protocols essentially lock this at 8 character alpha. It would be a huge pain in the ass, for everyone, to change this just because some exchange wants to appeal to a potential listing.
- MrDOS 3mo ago> 8 character alpha Good thing “xn--zp9h” fits, then.
- HolyLampshade 3mo agoAmusingly there is plenty of precedent (link below under Nasdaq Integrated Platform Suffix and the older ACT/CTCI suffixes) for using all of the wonderful character symbols to indicate different classes of securities. Not as common, again, as it used to be...but still exists. https://www.nasdaqtrader.com/trader.aspx?id=CQSsymbolconvention https://www.nasdaqtrader.com/trader.aspx?id=CQSsymbolconvent...
- stockresearcher 3mo ago
- tibbydudeza 3mo agoTime to fork it and build a new place for true open source.
- axegon_ 3mo agoThis is going to suck. Open weight models need to become the norm on torrents.
- makach 3mo agoAgree. this sucks already.
- pulkas 3mo agois this a leverage? https://openai.com/index/hugging-face-incident-and-the-road-ahead/ https://openai.com/index/hugging-face-incident-and-the-road-...
- WhereIsTheTruth 3mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_foreclosure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_foreclosure This acquisition should be blocked (and never will sadly), they now have both the incentive and the ability to influence a platform that's supposed to be hardware agnostic (and built trust over that) toward CUDA stack Microsoft did the exact same with github, acquired stack agnostic platform, and turned it into a copilot/azure one
- calgoo 3mo agoI could put on a tinfoil hat and say that nvidia will have some control on the flow of the open models, so if someone like the US government want to "control" and police the models like Dario was talking about then this investment might actually make sense. The HF platform can then be used as the "controlled" channel and any other site can be designated a national security risk and blocked / taken down.
- elAhmo 3mo agoWe are witnessing a set of very disrupting in the industry and it is very hard to say how things will look like. AI companies buying runtimes, frameworks, editors, model routers, model hosting providers, teams behind databases... It is hard to find anyone able to reject the insane amount of money. Very optimistic to say this will not have profound effects on the whole industry.
- ulfw 3mo agoThe incest is real
- onel 3mo agoOut of all the companies that could have acquired hugging face, I think nvidia is the best fit. If it had to happen, happy it was them
- leetgent 3mo agoAre there any HF alternatives besides https://modelscope.cn/ https://modelscope.cn/, particularly any based not in China?
- twobitshifter 3mo agosomeone mentioned torrents as an option.
- niutech 2mo agoKaggle, Civitai.
- doublerabbit 3mo agoYou're running the leading website to the future of LLM and Ai and you decide to Nvidia. All for $13bn, folk don't understand money.
- minraws 3mo agoI honestly feel like we centralized too much on huggingface same as github.
- mchinen 3mo agoThat huge impromptu 2023 party at the Exploratorium Hugging Face did had such amazing covid-unthawing AI spring energy, and I keep thinking about it. It was clear then they had the momentum to do a lot of things, and more so now. So I was surprised by this news. The party is a is a relatively small concern compared to the openness and github comparisons, but since no one else mentioned it, I hope something like it happens again. Or maybe that moment has passed.
- ricardobayes 3mo agoAnyone could comment or speculate what this enormous valuation stems from? Sources list their revenue as $150M? If true this is likely one of the biggest valuation gap I've ever seen. IMO hugging face is not something could not be reproduced, perhaps not very easily but I see its business model akin to github's. Various github alternatives exist and so will hugging face alternatives.
- sigmoid10 3mo agoHuggingface is not a product, it's a community. It's the go-to place where everyone who has anything to do with open AI models gathers. You could trivially reproduce their stack, but building such a huge AI community around a single place is probably impossible by now.
- xyproto 3mo agoWhat will the long term effects of this be? Models on Hugging Face that only runs properly on NVIDIA hardware?
- doublerabbit 3mo agoGatekeeping, censorship. Locked in vendor ship. lot's of things ending in "ship" and "ing".
- fmind-dev 3mo agoI made a joke to my teammates today: "This will half the amount of AI startup in Europe ..."
- minimaxa 3mo agoNothing like a good old Oligarchy going as planned
- JeffreyEpstein 3mo agoIs this why OpenAI tried to say they “hacked” them lol
- pluc 3mo agoRemember when Facebook bought Instagram for a BILLION dollars and everyone thought it was insane? THIRTEEN BILLIONS for ONE THING.
- shiandow 3mo agoI think everyone just reads *illion and thinks 'lots of money'. The amounts are incomprehensible at this point. I don't think anyone can conceive of 13 billion dollars accurately, including the people brokering this deal, they're just thinking of bargaining chips and weighing them in comparison to how many they have.
- pluc 3mo agoFun fact: a billion is 10 to 12th power in French and 10 to the power of 9 in English. A US billion is 1 000 000 000, a French billion is 1 000 000 000 000. (French as in francophone, not exclusively from France)
- ozgung 3mo agoWhen Facebook bought Instagram they basically bought a photo sharing app with 10-50 Million monthly active users. Today it has 3 Billion monthly active users. In hindsight, $1B looks a very good deal for a giant like Instagram. But it wasn't a giant back then, it was just a photo sharing app and it was really insane. So it must not be about the app or the network. Facebook paid that price to enter the mobile social media market as the market leader. BTW Instagram raised $50 million at the valuation of $500M, just 4 days before the Facebook acquisition. %100 return of investment in 4 days, I think that's insane.
- pm90 3mo agoWhy? Aren’t private markets willing to invest in AI companies? Was something wrong with their arr? What?
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- ai_umwelt 3mo agoNvidia is protecting their investments. Now Huggingface won't sue OpenAI for the hack. That will get swept under the rug.
- VonLuderitz 3mo agoAlibaba's Modelscope like it.
- tesnorindian 3mo agoNow what will happen to the llama.cpp performance on non Nvidia GPUs and especially on arm64 CPU chips after this acquisition? Will Apple M* chips and cloud arm64 chips (Graviton, Cobalt, Axion) become second class? Just now I got my hands wet with local LLMs before this was announced. Can somebody from llama.cpp/ggml.ai confirm this?
- maxweylandt 3mo agowonder if the article got updated? Currently it reads: >The companies have not yet reached a deal, and the talks could still fall apart, the person said. Business Insider on Sunday was the first to report that Hugging Face was fielding takeover interest.
- armcat 3mo agoHF has been a close part of my ML/AI career, coinciding exactly when I moved into this space 10 years ago. There are lot of nuances here (if the deal goes through). Some people say it's a loss for EU sovereign AI but HF is technically an American corporation. On the positive note, the founders (Julien, Thomas and Clem - all French) stem to make significant amount of money, which they are likely to pour into a new frontier AI lab in Europe. So potentially it's a big win. For Nvidia this is a great strategic play as it potentially gains control of the "AI app store" and can influence the direction of Transformers, Diffusers, PEFT and various other HF libs inits favour. At the same time Nvidia has been (somewhat paradoxically) a dominant force in actual "open source" AI and has contributed significantly via Nemotron and various optimisers close to the metal. This would likely accelerate further. Nvidia has everything to gain from having a massive open model ecosystem, instead of a consolidated market consisting of 2-3 players. Will that have impact on MLX and other contributions? We'll see!
- codemog 3mo ago> which they are likely to pour into a new frontier AI lab in Europe HF was.. a hub to download models and some of the worst source code in the space that contributed to huge amounts bugs that did a lot of downstream damage. Go ahead and read their blog by their CTO on how they don’t believe in DRY and then implemented DRY in the worst way imaginable with unnecessary code generation. Their BLOOM model was a joke and dead on arrival. But yea these guys are definitely going to be the frontier of EU AI.
- 6bb32646d83d 3mo agoA good reminder that moving fast and getting product fit >>>>> code quality
- aatd86 3mo agoIt has to be a bell curve doesn't it.. I am too much of a perfectionist... Then again, my llms constantly claim that I am doing things that are beyond the SOTA. Even my own mom lost hope.. Still haven't shipped a single thing... haha. (half joke aside, it is finally coming in a couple days.. which I have been saying for quite some time to the extent that my peeps don't even trust me anymore.. 3 things are coming and it is genuinely research grade apparently, for the amount of research I am aware that is released publicly. I really don't know how people ship things, the tooling I see is terrible, or maybe I have NIH syndrome...)
- stuaxo 3mo agoThere goes the neighbourhood.
- huurtehoog 3mo agoThis is the opening move of the end game for the current "AI" wave. Hyperscalers and hardware manufacturers will absorb the overgrowth and hopefully (for them, sucks for us) settle at the top of the software value chain. The only way to make all the money poured into compute for the last 4 years pay for itself at any level is selling people and corporations on very inefficient software for the next couple of decades. Not too different from what "the cloud" did to this market from 2015 or so...
- doublerabbit 3mo agoSomeone gets it. The start of the end to the AI bubble bursting.
- huurtehoog 3mo agoNo, see, I'm making the opposite argument. This is not a bubble, this is a deliberate play by capital owners to increase returns on capital to the detriment of labor. Much like "the cloud" before. The increased capital intensity in software was inevitable and it has accelerated since 2022.
- doublerabbit 3mo agoWhich is the start of the bubble bursting. VCs invest, no one can compete and those with the moats survive.
- galangalalgol 3mo agoSo anytime someone comes out with something efficient it will get bought and bloated?
- seanclayton 3mo agoBusinesses trust brand names, not efficiency.
- huurtehoog 3mo ago
- johnhamlin 3mo agoI can’t imagine any way NVIDIA could make this worth its money that doesn’t suck for everyone else
- conorcleary 3mo agoWhat a farce, this whole thing.
- mcemilg 3mo agoStarted from an ugly repository and ended up making history in less than 10 years, from `pytorch-pretrained-bert` to huggingface, well deserved, its fascinating to follow.
- randusername 3mo agoGrim prediction: "Quantized models are no longer permitted on the Hugging Face platform. Reduced precision models are a safety hazard and a violation of our TOS. Click here to speak with a sales representative about our many exciting cloud hosting offerings or enterprise GPU packages."
- cyanydeez 3mo agoProbably start with the abliterated ones first. But selling more product is still on thr table until cloud AI starts the real cash drain, then therell be google like shenanigans.
- armcat 3mo agoDon't see this happening. Both Nemo and TensorRT from Nvidia are heavily invested in low precision formats and higher inference throughput as well as low memory use. It's more about what happens in relation to GGUF, MLX and non CUDA-native frameworks/formats.
- belzebub 3mo agoBingo.
- Tenoke 3mo agoToo base cynicism. I'd be willing to bet you my $200 to your $100 that doesn't happen.
- tclancy 3mo agoNatural log cynicism and any cynicism about public corporations in our late-stage capitalism world is likely to look tame a year later. Or possibly too.
- randusername 3mo agoYou're probably right. It was mostly hyperbole, but the older I get the more I think hyperbole does eventually come to pass in situations like this. It's gradual, though, not all at once.
- rwmj 3mo agoCan someone explain how this works? Huggingface serves enormous files and therefore presumably must pay huge cloud fees. As the dot com joke goes, they make a loss on every transaction, but don't worry, they're going to make it up in volume.
- garbageslopdev 3mo agoFuck.
- garbageslopdev 3mo agoI really can only say: Fuck
- stuaxo 3mo agoPretty good for a little github-ish clone.
- ceroxylon 3mo agoA dark shadow moves over the meadow…
- punnerud 3mo agoMy prediction is that HuggingFace will take up the challenge with OpenRouter (now Stripe) and ollama.com (Facebook)
- blondie9x 3mo agoWhat has open in tech become now? Just in recent weeks Openrouter bought out by Stripe and now hugging face bought out by NVIDIA. Is this really freedom and choice for consumers? No it’s the proliferation and nomination of big tech.
- shevy-java 3mo agoThey dish out a gazillion money. It's like a gold rush. Meanwhile, RAM prices still go up. I want my money back.
- Kye 3mo agoOpenRouter->Stripe (~$7B) Hugging Face->Nvidia ($13B) Keep an eye on Exa. With local models and niche harnesses proliferating, they're going to need a way to search without everyone having to run their own index. Google is an obvious buyer if they could get it past regulators. A Doubleclick-level addition of the agentic stuff they're bad at to the indexing they're good at. Nvidia is the obvious less conflicted #2 Secret third option: Cloudflare. They're already the glue for so much of this stuff.
- throwatdem12311 3mo agoBig money buying up open source. This has never gone wrong, nope.
- sriniwasx 3mo agoSeems a bit high
- digitaltrees 3mo agoThis trend to vertical integration is very dangerous. We should not allow the people making tech to control the whole pipeline unless we want a permanent underclass.
- mattstir 3mo agoSomething something Apple. For what it's worth though, I agree that companies _subsuming_ others to obtain complete vertical market capture has been a very dangerous trend.
- digitaltrees 3mo agoApple isnt an analog though, in order to be a relevant analogy they would need to buy Intel, TSMC and ASML and "commit" to preserving access to other people chip manufacturing. As it is, they are guilty of reserving capacity so other producers cant access current generation tech and have to weight a cycle, which I would argue should be blocked as anticompetitive by regulators but we have a perverse definition of free markets now that defines market consolidation and monopoly as markets working instead of recognizing they are a sign that a free market has been captured and destroyed. rant over.
- thunkshift1 3mo agoThe hyperscalers and OS vendors are doing. Why shouldnt hardware oems.
- andsoitis 3mo agoCongratulations to the Hugging Face team!
- Roark66 3mo agoSoo, what are they buying exactly? Can I setup a forgejo instance, upload a bunch of open source models to it and get bought out for $13bln? I fail to see the point of this. Their inference hosting is a joke (I don't think I ever had a working response from a "try this model" form). Their brand alone surely is not worth this much. So what are they paying for? I worry the answer is, for control over who is allowed to distribute the weights. Nothing else.
- penciltwirler 3mo agoHugging Face's internal storage system is more sophisticated now after they acquired XetHub. They have a clever way to chunk and content dedupe the data that makes it a lot more efficient to version control large files.
- Whitespace 3mo agoXet's tech is very interesting and I greatly enjoyed their blog posts and other technical writeups[0] But in the era of frontier models and hardware designed for fast model loading (eg: LLM on a chip) I can't imagine that this is worth so much. There's *a lot* of competition to improve Git LFS. So while I agree with you that this plays a role I also have to believe that it's to understand model usage by competition and thus stifle it. [0] - https://huggingface.co/docs/hub/en/xet/overview https://huggingface.co/docs/hub/en/xet/overview
- aniceperson 3mo agogit lfs just dumps your bin on s3, and is abandonoware since ms bought github, since github historically hosts on aws s3 and improving it would immediately benefit amazon. gh, the maintainers of it, is the only forge that does not allow clean-up unreachable artifact from the server.
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- varispeed 3mo ago
- prsutherland 3mo ago| Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B The title is not the linked article’s title. It is the title of the first article in the description. FWIW, “agrees” is a weird verb. Kinda sounds like they are doing this out of kindness and not their own interests.
- redlewel 3mo agoHope the first thing Nvidia does is change the name and logo
- Gecko4072 3mo agoWill someone back up important models to an Anna's Archive style website? Or will there be torrent trackers?
- akshay_akula 3mo agoThe Microsoft GitHub comparison is the right frame. Worked out fine there, hope the same here.
- MotoriX 3mo agoNvidia buying Hugging Face would give them even more control over the AI ecosystem. The big question is whether Hugging Face could remain truly neutral once it’s owned by a chipmaker with plenty of competitors.
- Danox 3mo agoNo Hugging Face as you know is dead it’s just a matter of time.
- drob518 3mo agoWell, there goes the neighborhood. This is why we can’t have nice things.
- almostdeadguy 3mo agoLetting a hack go without pressing charges has never been so lucrative.
- kevinthedigger 3mo agoThat’s a lot but if it makes people happy.
- gjvc 3mo agomodels being pulled in 3... 2... 1...
- gjvc 3mo agodunno why this is being downvoted (check back in six months)
- tolugenius 3mo agoAssuming this deal goes through, I do wonder what this means for the future of open source models. Like it's very possible the next deepseek model host it's weight on it's site first, vs treating HF as a canonical hosting site. Just my guess, but regardless we'll have to see how labs (and even countries) respond to a less neutral HF.
- LurkandComment 3mo agoIt could go either way. I think its better for Nvidia to play both open sides and closed models as their chips will be used in both. The only thing that compromises them is that there is a lot of investment they have in the closed models. Time to see how Jensen plays it.
- professorpalmer 3mo agoThe suits are taking our toys! Scary!
- FireUpTheTorren 3mo agoWho is hosting the next great model hosting platform or community? Thoughts on WebTorrent? What should we do?
- bicepjai 3mo agoIs it time we have torrented version of models available for download ?
- LarsDu88 3mo agoGood ol commoditize your compliment model. Sell GPUs? Make LLMs cheap. If Anthropic and OpenAI makes their own inference hardware, this is a shot across the bow for making their business worthless. Expect the next NEMOTRON to top the AI performance indices.
- fitsumbelay 3mo agoThere are a lot problems with this post - Only "The Information" is claiming the deal's done. - Neither CNBC, Reuters, Techcrunch nor the Business Insider post whose title is cited do more than reference The Information's paywalled claim - Only TC _even mentions_ the potential ~$13B deal on its homepage - Not even a mention on Lobste.rs
- todteera 3mo ago[dead]
- CurbStomper 3mo ago[dead]
- AbstractH24 3mo agoWaht is Hugging Face's protective moat? Why can't everyone on it just move elesehwere? Guess the answer is scale, same reason folks don't leave twitter/x.
- sharadov 3mo agoVery clever - they bought the distribution platform for AI!
- ckrapu 3mo agoI am quite happy to see such a successful outcome for this team. When looking at the landscape of AI-adjacent startups, rarely do you see such a nice balance between following the hype and providing a sufficiently useful and general service that makes technology more accessible to all.
- kpres62 3mo agoI identify as Hugging Face...
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- crsv 3mo agoWhat an absolute bag get for the hugging face team. Way to get out on top.
- lazarus01 3mo agowith nvidia's dominance as the operating system of AI it further concentrates it's dominance in developer ecosystems, keeping costs high and creating risk as a single point of failure, as there is only one company in the world manufacturing nvidia chips in Taiwan (TSMC), making Taiwan the most important country to the ai industry nvidia will become the next cisco - this can't last forever In 2000, Cisco Systems became the world's most valuable company by selling the routers required to build the internet. However, telecom companies bought hardware much faster than consumers adopted internet services. When the monetization gap widened, hardware orders were canceled, Cisco's stock crashed by 80%, and the broader economy fell into a recession. If consumer demand for AI software does not soon match the trillions being spent on Nvidia's chips, a sudden cancellation of orders could wipe out massive amounts of stock market wealth tied to index funds
- beyondscale-yes 3mo agoModel supply-chain security deserves more attention. Enterprises should verify model provenance and signatures before deployment—not blindly trust the hosting platform. Acquisition changes the trust boundary.
- apoorvprecisely 3mo agomonopoly, this is just sad
- cbeach 3mo agoInteresting that Hugging Face turned down a $500M investment from Nvidia less than a year ago (at a $7B valuation) because they "didn't want a dominant investor that could sway its decisions" https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/26/nvidia-closes-in-on-hugging-face-acquisition/ https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/26/nvidia-closes-in-on-huggin... Ten months later they're selling the entire company to Nvidia for $12.9B. So much for not wanting a dominant investor ... I pull weights from HF most weeks (Ollama, ComfyUI etc) and I suspect Nvidia aren't paying 86x revenue for a file host. They're paying for the fact that every README, notebook and workflow on the planet has a hardcoded huggingface.co path in it. It's the npm/PyPI of AI, and now the company that sells the GPUs also owns the registry that decides which models are easy to find and download I don't think Nvidia will start deleting models. They don't need to. They just need to make sure the models that run best on CUDA get promoted, and the ones that run well on a Mac or an AMD card (or the "abliterated" finetunes) quietly get less visibility. Nvidia have plenty of form for this kind of segmentation (e.g. removing NVLink from consumer cards after the 3090). The only alternative registry with any real scale is ModelScope, which is owned by Alibaba. So the choice for anyone worried about this is an American GPU monopoly or the Chinese Communist Party. Anyone know of a serious third option?
- _giorgio_ 3mo agoI've tried many times to run those hugging face hosted models. Slow, unreliable, unusable, long licenses that you have to sign and then wait. I've used probably 3 times in 3 years. I don't see the value... probably it has simply some users.
- nyxtom 2mo agoThis is a wild acquisition in the making, congrats to the HF team
- mohsinq227 2mo ago[flagged]
- deepamt31 2mo ago$13B for what people called a file host is Nvidia buying the place everyone already pulls weights. they didn't need a new lab.
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