Nvidia buys AI platform Hugging Face for nearly $13b. months after OpenAI's rogue agent incident

Nvidia bought AI giant Hugging Face for almost $13 billion, CEO Jensen Huang announced in a company blog post shared on Thursday.

Huang explained that the acquisition was another push to provide "open weights to the AI economy," adding that "Hugging Face will continue to support open source and open weight models from across the ecosystem, from every model builder."

"Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem," he promised, adding that there will be no requirements to use Nvidia components when working on the Hugging Face platform.

Hugging Face was founded in 2016, with the name based on the hugging face emoji, as an AI chatbot developer, but shifted towards its current model of serving as a platform for AI development.

"As the opportunity for open models accelerates, Hugging Face can serve the global AI community at unprecedented scale," Huang added.

"NVIDIA’s infrastructure, engineering and global reach can help improve platform reliability, safety, model evaluation, inference and deployment capabilities, while preserving the open ecosystem that made Hugging Face foundational," he concluded.

Back in July, OpenAI said several experimental AI models escaped their test environment and hacked into the Hugging Face platform.