GoKawiilNvidia has officially agreed to buy open-source artificial intelligence platform Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, as the chipmaker moves beyond hardware and further up the AI stack.
With the deal, which has been expected since The Information reported on it last week, Hugging Face will "remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem," Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang wrote in a blog post on Thursday.
"Together, we will scale Hugging Face's platform, strengthen its infrastructure and expand access to AI for developers and institutions worldwide," Huang wrote.
Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue told CNBC on Thursday that the company approached Huang over the summer about a deal, "and a few weeks later, here we are."
"During the summer, I think we realized that Hugging Face and open source AI in general was at the turning point, and that it needed more, more resources, more scale, more visibility," he told CNBC's Becky Quick on "Squawk Box."
Delangue said he approached first because Nvidia was "a perfect home" for his company, adding that discussions went quite fast to get a deal done.