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Nvidia to acquire Hugging Face(cnbc.com)
255 points by tosh 6 hours ago | 72 comments

https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-to-acquire-hugging-face...

lode 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Discussed last week at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49458161

cmiles8 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Not sure why this is news again this week when it was already announced previously. NYTimes was also reporting this like it was news today.

retinaros 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Wasn’t official

the__alchemist 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

In related news, Voyager has left the solar system!

Bluestein 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Further, they launched a second probe. First!

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WoDQBhJCVQ

cmiles8 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Sure, but that’s the case for basically all acquisitions.

gk1 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Unfortunately not all deals go through. Like Wiz + Google, or Figma + Adobe. A lot can go wrong between “in talks to acquire” and “acquired.” The official announcement is less surprising but still newsworthy.

tantalor 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Um, Google did actually acquire Wiz in March.

gk1 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I meant the first attempt in 2024, which fell apart: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/23/technology/google-wiz-dea...

7bit 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Because it's a new blog post with new information

sealthedeal 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

These Hugging Face guys made out like BANDITS!!!! Good for them. My favorite part is they approached Jensen for the buyout. They knew, very smart and mature on the founders/board.

irthomasthomas an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Overheard: "It would be a shame if Hugging Face had to press charges for hacking against your best customer. Perhaps if I was busy counting my money, it might slip my mind."

himata4113 40 minutes ago | parent [-]

I doubt that would go anywhere, but this is a very funny joke regardless!

chews 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don’t think many realize how hard it is to raise for a no revenue company that isn’t buying out large GPU contracts and racking machines.

They have a winning product for sure… the worlds models have chosen a hugging face workflow, but honestly where would they be able to find the revenue required to justify another couple rounds at ever higher valuations.

To me, I think these folks see that the music is getting harder to hear and might stop entirely, might as well cash out. I do hope their employees were well taken care of, and 13b of NVDA is likely to be worth a lot more in the coming years.

sealthedeal 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Agreed. Take a ~$13bn buyout im sure cash and stock is the smartest thing to do for a company their size and age. Take the profits now and keep building securely. I imagine their employees very much gotten taken care of. Jensen mentioned an additional $1bn in cash compensation etc to keep employees at HF.

willy_k 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> To me, I think these folks see that the music is getting harder to hear and might stop entirely

At the frontier companies, but not for hugging face or nvidia. Their business are going to be around for a while considering how local models are performing now.

dragandj an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I don't think local models would require hardware at nearly the scale that the datacenter buildout for OpenAI/Anthropic/etc. required. Nvidia got as high as the Icarus, it will be hard not to melt, despite they being a real company with real product that is so in demand that you can't buy their hardware even when you're willing to pay above the recommended price. They are addicted to billions, and the cold turkey clean-up will be painful as hell.

slowin 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

What is hugging face's business? I thought they were just free model hosting.

retinaros an hour ago | parent [-]

Selling pro accounts for storage. Its at best a few ten millions arr maybe 100-150

alexpadula 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Maybe they approached, tried to work together but then got bought out? Very common.

sealthedeal 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I watched their CNBC interview this morning with Hugging Face CEO and Jensen. HF CEO specifically said they went to Jensen and said they wanted to join forces. Obviously more elegant lol.

bionhoward 15 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I personally think this acquisition is genius anybody who could afford it would be wise to own HuggingFace because they are incredible

oefrha 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Feels like acquiring Docker Hub (just the hub, not even Docker Inc that controls Docker the software) in ~2018. AI craze valuations are truly out there.

SillyUsername an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Somebody better prep archive.org to buy a few more petabytes of storage.

corysama an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

My understanding of Hugging Face is limited to "File Host with Model Cards". Can someone with more understanding explain what the $12 billion value comes from?

eitally an hour ago | parent [-]

They offer inference, too. I don't know anyone who uses this service, but presumably it must be reasonably popular.

gk1 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Happy for the hugging face team. Many great folks there who’ve waited patiently for HF to find a business model, and finally they get something even better.

abhayaya 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Hugging Face has an identity problem. It needs a gestalt therapist to take it back to where it was meant to grow up.

dfdydx 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Where was it meant to grow up?

unddoch 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Theoretically, can Nvidia direct Hugging Face to sue OpenAI now for the hack? Surely they could find some interesting stuff in discovery :)

hmokiguess 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I was also theorizing that part of their acquisition was to get more intel on that, though I feel like in practice that whole thing right now is just theatre for inflating the cybersec market

pantalaimon 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There was this summery about it, not sure how you'd need more intel - the technical details of the attack are ephemeral

https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/openai-huggingface

oh_no 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

the last thing nvidia would want is to make ai look more legally risky

to say nothing of their massive investments direct and indirect in openai

jackb4040 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Yep. In fact, eliminating that risk on OpenAI's behalf was probably a small factor in the acquisition

Grombobulous 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The OpenAI web page on the Hugging Face incident is so slick that it basically confirms that the entire incident was a marketing exercise.

It’s obvious that designers and other content specialists spent multiple days crafting this page.

https://openai.com/index/hugging-face-incident-and-the-road-...

acd10j 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Why would they sue OpenAI, openai is their one of biggest customer.

aslkalska 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

why would they sue their client ?! what does that say to all their other clients ?

BloodyIron 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Clients sue other business partners all the time, that doesn't mean they stop working together. There's lots of examples of this.

mcintyre1994 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I suspect there are very few examples of it when they are as entangled and invested in them as Nvidia is in OpenAI.

aslkalska 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

no they don't - not when the lawsuit would affect the demand for the thing they're selling

LtWorf 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Why would they sue one of their most important customers?

deaton 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Not to mention that they own a 10% stake in OpenAI

par an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Is it feasible for someone else to just start something almost identical by hosting a bunch of local models?

doublerabbit 28 minutes ago | parent [-]

Not without lots of money or decent network peering. A 30GB model downloaded a lot of times is a lot of bandwidth.

There's more to than just the website, network bandwidth costs. Security, storage and infrastructure costs to name a few.

You can't just spin up a VPS and host a brain jar shop.

Capricorn2481 16 minutes ago | parent [-]

> There's more to than just the website, network bandwidth costs. Security...

Well they may have saved some money on one of those

ChrisArchitect 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

$12,930,300,000?

Hugging face emoji = HTML entity 🤗

(https://x.com/calebfahlgren/status/2095516397879152851)

arbuge 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They approached Nvidia to start the conversation. I guess sometimes great companies are sold, not just bought.

malwrar 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Is the fact that Nvidia is also massively financing the closed-models companies, which stand to lose when open model project(s) take off, a conflict of interest here? I can’t tell if this is nvidia hedging or planning to embrace & extinguish.

notatoad 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

no, it's not a conflict of interest to invest in multiple companies who compete with each other.

pphysch 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Nvidia is among the best positioned if open models win.

gscott an hour ago | parent [-]

Most of nvidia's revenue comes from data center scale out. They will loose their ass if local models win.

c0rruptbytes 21 minutes ago | parent [-]

open models don’t imply local models… it just allows more people to run them, most likely with nvidia GPUs

Danox an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The goal of the deal is to speed up open source according to Nvidia what a laugh ha ha ha …

Where is the EU in all this? Is this not similar to letting another European tech company disappear from Europe ie.. Arms Holding which was sold to the Japanese, how do you compete going into the future in the tech world if you let European companies be bought out by foreign companies. Declaring them gatekeepers down the road and issuing a fine will never make you a tech powerhouse.

Is this just another symptom of the EU being run by politicians and lawyers who don’t seem to grasp/understand tech.

deweywsu 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There goes the neighborhood.

iworshipfaangs2 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Another investing W for Kevin Durant, who is likely producing better returns than most VCs while being a full-time athlete.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/kevin-durant-investment-portf...

Grombobulous 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Let’s not forget to give credit to his family office. High net worth individuals don’t just personally do things like make investments themselves. They hire experts to do that.

Sure, at some point Kevin Durant made the high-level decision that he wanted to invest in high-growth startup companies. But there’s a very low chance that he’s working the day-to-day of that process.

ishtanbul 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I’d put it close to zero. He was likely presented with the deal once it was sourced and reviewed by his investment team, who likely did 100% of the work. It doesn’t mean he didn’t make the final decision, but pro athletes dont have time to do much investing work beyond high level networking and approving deals.

bdcravens 36 minutes ago | parent [-]

Durant is more than just an athlete who gets suggestions from those who handle his investments; he co-founded a venture firm ten years ago that has invested in over 100 companies.

https://www.hustlefund.vc/post/angel-squad-kevin-durant-inve...

While it's true he may not "do the work" and relies on those he's hired, the same is true of the Mark Cubans of the world.

rvz an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Together, we will make AI more open, more capable and more accessible to people and institutions around the world.

Agreed. You can make nvcc and CUDA the next software that should be open sourced.

trilogic 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Huggingface, llama.cpp and all European frontier. Congrats to Huggingface Team, that amount is tempting but nowhere near your real evaluation. You were about to blow up and there is no AI bubble (just not enough infrastructure like energy and hardware to process current and exponential inevitable growing tokens). Huggingface is bringing the real value to AI community, all the rest is more like scalping IMHO. Nvidia is a great company but not opensource friendly by historical doings. Today is a sad day for the community. Put a timer 2 year from now and mark this words: Huggingface is the free foundation, get what you can today.

philkuz 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Outdated take. Nvidia now open sources whatever will make them sell more chips. Keeping the backbone of Oss model delivery afloat seems like it would sell more chips.

tomalbrc 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> Nvidia now open sources whatever will make them sell more chips

Oh what did they release?

barrenko 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yes, also feel this is a massive underpricing.

retinaros 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Life changing for engineers having joined a few year ago. Congrats

liquicity 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Openrouter and huggingface both sold to multi billion dollar entities in the same few weeks - perhaps this is great for the founders, but as a consumer I hate this acquisition loop that happens with every company of adequate size these days.

rvz an hour ago | parent [-]

Or maybe they know that this AI bubble will not last.

forestry 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Dupe.

philipwhiuk 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I don't really understand why the AI equivalent of Maven Central is worth 12.9 billion dollars but maybe I'm an idiot.

tantalor 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Network effect.

Same reason why Github (fancy file storage website) was worth $7B+

unethical_ban an hour ago | parent [-]

What data can an be extracted from hf though? With GitHub you get a lot of user behavior analysis and can offer enterprise features and see private repositories.

tantalor 5 minutes ago | parent [-]

The users are the product.

retinaros 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Its a s3 wrapper. Can be replaced by a wordpress with torrents too. But they built an ecosystem around it and some libs/content. i guess thats what nvidia value