I think it's a plausible play that keeps the AI boom in session for a year or two longer.

Or at least, $13b to stay at the head of the race (or keep the race running) must be worth it to someone's desk.

There's only $50b in datacenter buildout nationally (Source: Gemini, 2026).

So it is a bit of a puzzling choice for what amounts to a pile of software, in my opinion. but I don't know shit.

Nvidia has hardly open sourced the nvcc compiler, yet no-one here is complaining about why it is closed source.

Modular on the other hand creates the Mojo compiler gets criticised for not open sourcing it immediately and now once they do, no-one cares anymore.

Huggingface was not just a target for open source, but as a force to have open weight models run better on Nvidia against the rest.

Yes. Great for devs, for a while. Awful for overall competition and industry's health.

I think the federal antitrust regulators are asleep.

Edit: antitrust regulators' job has just begun -- we'll see how this deal gets adjudicated by the FTC (if at all).

True, but better nvidia than any other big tech contender. Nvidia has a very strong business incentive to make huggingface thrive, whereas pretty much everyone else has the opposite incentive.

> That’s at least a plus. I will happily burn through as much VC money as they will give me to tinker with my projects.

The era of VC-funded home-delivery recipe boxes is still my favourite.

Yeah this is the "early netflix" era. Take advantage while you can and plan for the future.

They have various paid services that relate to AI—paid inference hosting; paid accounts aimed at AI development with GPU rentals [credits plus paid overages, I believe], more private storage and public storage than free accounts; and many of the community a and some other benefits on individual/team/enterprise tiers; additional paid storage above the base quotas for the paid account tiers; on demand rentals of HF managed containers on GCP and AWS, and some other things.

Didn’t we just witness it? Become a critical ecosystem player then get acquired based on the value of that position.

Isn't this pretty much the model for any tech company? Rush to get MVP released, stoke the hype, cash in on FOMO.

They don't need a business model to have value here.

They sell a few cloud services, but the most valuable thing in their portfolio is live, engaged accounts from pretty much every person directly interested in running AI models.

If you were an org positioned to do sell better cloud services on a wildly better margin, wanted to promote consumer-binned AI hardware from your manufacturing chain, or wanted to promote new AI enterprise or research-support initiatives, those accounts would seem to be an absurdly fantastic collection of warm leads that you could gradually mine and upsell (and critically: that your competitors could no longer buy/use themselves).

I guess we may have to start paying to download models.

Or perhaps they will start throttling downloads for free users.

I don't know what they business case is, it might be to shut them down: I suspect good free models on local hardware is a threat to Nvidia's investments in OpenAI/Anthropic.

ondemand cloud? b2b?

Acquisition of GitHub let to increased downtimes, but also to unlimited private repos for the free tier.

There are always torrents, which would seem to be a fine way to distribute models.

We also have modelscope.cn, I'm sure that one won't get acquired

Same reason why GitHub was acquired for $7.5B at $250 million ARR which is 30x revenues:

VCs could not see any other reason to raise more money and Huggingface was not growing as fast as they thought to justify the valuation or the next fundraise.

So they might as well get Nvidia to save them from the VCs pressurizing them.

As someone who've played video games and obsessed over graphics cards long before this all started, don't get your hopes up.

I think they will be, Nvidia has released open source model that also included the data it was trained on. I think they are the only ones that have done that.

You've sold out when you became VC Funded... It's just a matter of how long the free punch lasts.

What, are you expecting them to just work for good vibes?

To be fair, this is the best thing that can happen for the founders. I don't blame them.

According to The Information, it seem it's finalized? https://www.theinformation.com/articles/nvidia-agrees-buy-op...

Linus Torvalds: 'Nvidia has been the single worst company we've ever dealt with'

His other comments on Nvidia often contain expletives.

Isn't it super easy for the community to just replace HuggingFace? Isn't it pretty much just a repo/index for open-weight models? Why is it even worth anything?

It also means that finding models that aren't "approved" will be dealt by other websites.

good or bad, it comes down to a financial decision. Nvidia was willing to offer the highest bidding price, and HF was willing to sell.

The VC capital for AI is probably drying up. Now the question is: who will buy OpenAI and Anthropic?

Gemini did a good job of explaining it. fwiw, it may have helped that i accused Gemini of leading me to a "scam site" like "mega dot com"

You could just go to their website and look at the pricing pages? Why are you asking an LLM?

That is a very good point. I will set aside some storage and download those models that I think are most at risk from a corporate clean-up action.

I don't think nvda has ever pushed the idea that ai is too powerful for regular people.

That's the anthropics and openais of the world.

Owning the roots, the trunk, the branches and the tip of the leafs.

It’s not misleading according to the The Information piece (second link)

  > Nvidia Agrees to Buy Open Source Model Repository Hugging Face For $12.9 Billion

The story is in an intermediate state right now, but as semiquaver points out, The Information is reporting it as fact. Since their reporting tends to be as reliable as it is hardwalled, we went with their claim in the title.

Please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.

No doubt you have the nucleus of a substantive comment here, but that's not enough. If you only post the shallowest top stratum of what you're thinking, other people do the same, and then we get "Laws are for poor people" and endless descending repetition. The whole point of this site is to try for something other than that.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

p.s. Also, please don't be snarky on HN. That's also in the guidelines.

I thin HF holds huge power in how they’ve consolidated all the open models and data, but monopoly feels like a stretch here. They are in reality a fairly small startup with lots of alternatives (all of which are much worse at this point granted) and are mostly a loss leading part of the open source ecosystem. I think it would be very hard to make a case against this on monopoly grounds, though I wouldn’t be opposed to someone trying if they thought it was possible.

sometimes it is comments like these that make me wish hn had a block button

The AI judge doesn’t have that feature yet

Laws are for poor people