Chipmaker Nvidia to acquire AI developer platform Hugging Face for nearly $13B

US chipmaker Nvidia has agreed to acquire artificial intelligence (AI) developer platform Hugging Face for around $12.9 billion, its founder and CEO announced Thursday. "I'm excited to announce that NVIDIA has agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12,930,300,000," Jensen Huang said in a statement. Noting that 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, Huang said more than 200,000 companies use the platform to discover, evaluate, customize and deploy AI. Cathay Pacific cancels flights to Dubai, Riyadh until Dec. 1 "Together, we will scale Hugging Face's platform, strengthen its infrastructure and expand access to AI for developers and institutions worldwide," he added. Huang also underscored that Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem, adding NVIDIA compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face.