Nvidia is buying Hugging Face, the open model hosting platform, for $12.9 billion. Jensen Huang and Clement Delangue confirmed the deal on CNBC. Delangue said all three founders and the whole team will join Nvidia. He said Hugging Face will run as an independent, neutral platform inside Nvidia. Huang said Nvidia compute will not be required to build or deploy through the platform. He confirmed a roughly $1 billion retention plan for staff, which Delangue declined to discuss. Huang said other bidders were involved but would not name them. Delangue said a summer cyberattack, in which unreleased models attacked the company, pushed the decision. He argued open weights let defenders match attackers. Huang cited a CrowdStrike partnership using Nvidia's Nemotron open models.

• $12.9 billion acquisition price
• $4.5 billion valuation in 2023
• 18 million developers on Hugging Face
• 3 million models hosted