Hugging Face goes from a ‘scrappy’ startup named after an emoji to $13 billion Nvidia acquisition

Nvidia Corp. has officially confirmed the acquisition of AI hosting platform Hugging Face for approximately $12.93 billion. The deal follows recent reports from CNBC, Business Insider, and The Information regarding negotiations that began several weeks ago. While the acquisition is expected to drive mainstream adoption of open-weight models, some AI industry insiders express concern that Nvidia may leverage its position to influence these models to run exclusively on its proprietary hardware infrastructure.