#英伟达129亿美元收购HuggingFace NVIDIA spent $12.9 billion to acquire Hugging Face this time. My first reaction wasn’t, “Huang is buying another company again.” It was: This company that sells GPUs is no longer satisfied with just charging an “AI industry toll”.
Hugging Face now has over 18 million developers, more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets, and 1 million AI applications—with more than 200,000 companies using it to find models, fine-tune models, and deploy models.
In plain terms, it’s the “developers’ square” of the AI era. In the past, NVIDIA’s strength was GPUs. When AI companies trained models and ran inference, they would probably have to go through it. Now, even the entry point where developers search for models every day, download models, and deploy applications—it’s ready to take that over directly.
That’s what the $12.9 billion is really buying.
Even more astonishing is that Hugging Face’s previously disclosed annualized revenue was only about $150 million, and its valuation in 2023 was just $4.5 billion.
NVIDIA is now paying nearly three times that valuation.
Is it expensive?
Judging purely by the financials, of course it’s wildly expensive.
But Huang clearly isn’t calculating how much it will make this year—he’s thinking about who will control the entry point to the AI ecosystem in the future.
Because now OpenAI, Google, Meta, and Amazon are all making their own chips. So eventually NVIDIA will face a problem: what happens if large customers start reducing their reliance on GPUs?
The most direct solution is to push the front line forward.
I sell the chips, I control CUDA, I build the servers—and now I’m also deeply involved in the open-source model community. In the future, you may not necessarily have to buy NVIDIA models, but you’re very likely to begin building AI from the ecosystem influenced by NVIDIA.
Of course, this deal still has to pass regulatory approvals, and Jensen Huang has already clearly promised that Hugging Face will remain open, so other hardware such as AMD and Google can still be integrated.
But I think what’s truly worth a closer look is this:
In the past, people said NVIDIA sells “shovels.”
Now it’s not only buying into the mining industry—it’s starting to buy the entrances to the mining sites, the toolboxes, and even the miners’ community.
$12.9 billion looks like it’s buying Hugging Face.
In reality, Huang is buying the entry point for the next generation of AI developers.
#英伟达 $NVDAB #HuggingFace #AI