Nvidia recently agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $13 billion. The company went on to pledge that it would to scale the AI startup’s platform, strengthen infrastructure and expand access for developers and institutions.
Confirmation comes around a week after The Information first reported Nvidia was closing in on the acquisition.
In a statement, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang explained more than 18 million developers, researchers and creators use Hugging Face to share more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets and 1 million applications, while 200,000 companies use the platform to customise, develop and deploy AI.
Huang said he is committed to ensuring it remains an open source platform under Nvidia, supporting open weight models and multi-cloud and multi-accelerator development and deployment.
“Developers will choose the models they want, the frameworks they want, the clouds and inference service providers they want and the compute platforms they want. Nvidia compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face”, he added.
Hugging Face will be allowed to continue to permit model makers, developers and users to upload and download models and datasets of their choosing, supporting other silicon vendors.
Nvidia was already a backer of Hugging Face, releasing more than 500 models on its platform and more than 250 open datasets.
It has also provided financial support to the company in the past, along with Google, Amazon, Intel, Salesforce and others. The company was valued at $4.5 billion in a funding round three years ago.
Source: Mobile World Live
Image Credit: Nvidia & Hugging Face
Source: Tahawul Tech