Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang vows to keep Hugging Face ‘an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem’

Nvidia Corporation announced on Thursday that it has agreed to acquire the open-source AI platform Hugging Face for $12.93 billion. While rumors and speculation about Nvidia’s potential play had been swirling for weeks, the chipmaker has now made it official. Hugging Face, which is something of a GitHub for AI, has a library of models and datasets that should make Nvidia an even more dominant player in the AI ecosystem. Shares of Nvidia were up roughly 1.45% in early trading on Thursday after the news was announced. The stock (Nasdaq: NVDA) is up almost 21% year to date, outperforming the broader Nasdaq Composite’s roughly 14%. What Nvidia’s boss is saying In a blog post announcing the acquisition, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang appeared to imply that not much would change for Hugging Face users. “Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem,” Huang wrote. “Developers will choose the models they want, the frameworks they want, the clouds and inference service providers they want and the computing platforms they want.” He continued: “Hugging Face will continue to support open source and open weight models from across the ecosystem, from every model builder. It wil…