Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
HF was.. a hub to download models and some of the worst source code in the space that contributed to huge amounts bugs that did a lot of downstream damage. Go ahead and read their blog by their CTO on how they don’t believe in DRY and then implemented DRY in the worst way imaginable with unnecessary code generation.
Their BLOOM model was a joke and dead on arrival.
But yea these guys are definitely going to be the frontier of EU AI.
(half joke aside, it is finally coming in a couple days.. which I have been saying for quite some time to the extent that my peeps don't even trust me anymore.. 3 things are coming and it is genuinely research grade apparently, for the amount of research I am aware that is released publicly. I really don't know how people ship things, the tooling I see is terrible, or maybe I have NIH syndrome...)
I then asked him if the company was making a lot of money - he said yes, it was super successful.
Yeah probably more like the frontier of early retirement.
When a new model is released they have been able to have a working implementation days later, not months when the model was redundant. And often it's much more usable than the one-off, unmaintained, research code written in a very fragile environment.
BLOOM was a decent fully open and very large model for its time, and a huge coordination effort. It was around the same time as another "joke", OPT, but that gave Meta the knowledge that let them build Llama. Huggingface didn't have the money to compete in that race, but I'd bet it helped them stay at the frontier of AI software.
Google could have owned this space; they had TensorFlow hub, but it was too hard to use and too locked down. Huggingface made it easy to run and train transformers, and got the timing just right.
I'm glad someone is trying to build truly open models (along with the great work at Allen AI), because the likes of Meta and Alibaba are only going to release weights as long as it suits their business.
"The company was founded in 2016 by French entrepreneurs Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf in New York City, originally as a company that developed a chatbot app targeted at teenagers. ..." Wikipedia
Besides that: which EU and sovereignty doesn't really rhyme, given data protection, energy costs, AI restrictions and no vital start up scene at all.
Mistral is heavily state funded via Banks that are predominantly owned by the French state, so I don't get it.
Also name one global success that doesn't came from US? China? Well, second place maybe, but second in any sense.
Nevertheless, kudos to huggingface. Not only to the founders, but to the ecosystem and I guess it got harder by the day to finance all the hosting and only hope for the future, that Nvidia will help HF to thrive, at least not put burdens on them.
GitHub is still alive, and hope that HF will benefit from more AI power.
Nvidia doesn't have any disadvantages in my playbook, because hardware wise, there is no one to beat them in any regard and Apple will always stay nichy.
So well played - hopefully.
It could be worse or even a shut down otherwise, who knows. So for me it sounds cool and I am glad that EU isn't involved in any regard.
As the AI Act demands full disclosure under really easy to match requirements into your inner workings, this is quite the opposite of freely sharing information.
TikTok: achieved global cultural and algorithmic dominance.
DJI: controls roughly 70% of the global consumer and commercial drone market.
CATL: The world’s largest EV battery manufacturer.
BYD: Surpassed Tesla in total electric vehicle production volume.
Shein & Temu
The list goes on…
Paying pennies on the dollar for a BYD vehicle sounds great when all you consider is the initial sticker price. The real cost is what happens after you buy the disposable car and own it for a decade.
So yea. Second place is the reality and it is also true for AI models, and the hardware needed to run them.
Also, congratulations on landing a rocket 11 years after the US.
Took long enough.
To take a concept and refine it to reach mass production is success. It is what made the US what you believe it is today and it is what is creating a healthy supply chain in China. Just look at the challenges of Destin of Smarter Every Day[1] when producing a grill scrubber using only US suppliers and materials.
A “Made in the USA” label is no guarantee of superior design or manufacturing quality to me but if Japan is mentioned I have a greater confidence in the quality of the product.
How about...
SAP (Germany) - Most of the Fortune 500 run on their software.
Spotify (Sweden)
Novo Nordisk (Denmark) - most of America is taking their drugs.
Airbus (France) - Has out competed and out delivered Boeing for years.
Ericsson and Nokia (Finland and Sweden) - Most of American telecom systems use tech from them, essentially the western alternative to Huawei in telecom networking.
Adyen (Netherlands) - One of the worlds largest payment processors, processes most of American big tech payments.
ASML (Netherlands) - Responsible for building effectively every modern chip in the world outside of China.
Maersk (Shipping and logistics)
Siemens (Industrial Tech)
Infineon (Semis)
And there are so many more I'm missing btw. It's funny how incredibly biased you are, but the reality is that Europe and the USA are totally dependent on each other, tech wise.
If every European company which the US is dependent on immediately stopped trading with the US, the US would collapse as a country. And yes, the opposite is true also. But it was you who argued that Europe effectively has no successful companies, what rubbish.
May I remind you that in the US, Facebook is in that same list of top successes? Have you ever heard the phrase “the top minds of this generation of Americans are all working on ads”?
Also, if huggingface is “technically” American, then fuck me, Stripe is technically European. Hell, their CEO is insanely pro europe, pro EU, and a big enabler of projects like EU Inc and lately, the Rhine Group.
That itself does not reflect on all of EU. Since the UK left, Germany has probably been the worst “special child” of the lot to be honest; their notaries and trade unions are the primary challengers to EU Inc for the most ridiculous reasons for example.
But the talent is here.
Also, if SAP is "so bad", where are the amazing American competitors? From what I heard, the Oracle equivalent is even worse than SAP.
Build your own startup to compete with them! I'm guessing it's not as easy a product to make as people may assume.
They may not be a financial and industrial juggernaut like the others listed, but cultural significance doesn't have to be all about money.
You might want to remove your pink USA glasses and look around.
Spotify good enough for you?
Nothing paradoxical about it, open source AI use raises demand for nvidia's chips too.
Optimization is different, but that's not really a translation level task.
This is wildly offtopic, but: what's it been like for you?
A niche seemingly academic interest in 2016 has exploded into revolutionary practicality.
I bet you have some insights and good stories.
Three French founders set up the company in New York, raised their money from American investors (Salesforce, GV, IBM, Nvidia) and are now selling to an American chip company for $12.9B.
Europe's most successful AI company was only ever European in the nationality of its founders.
> the founders (Julien, Thomas and Clem - all French) stem to make significant amount of money, which they are likely to pour into a new frontier AI lab in Europe
Why would they do that? They already moved to America once to build a company. Since then the EU has passed the AI Act (obligations on general purpose model providers in force since August 2025), so the incentive to build the next one in Europe is weaker than it was in 2016, not stronger.
Ambitious Europeans have been voting with their feet for decades. The EU could fix this any time it liked by getting out of the way of its own entrepreneurs, but it prefers to write more regulation and then complain about "sovereignty" when the businesses it drove away get bought.
The company was founded in NYC. Anyone saying that is really a clown.
There's no EU sovereign AI. My EU is absolutely nowhere when it comes to AI or tech. No NVidia, no Google, no Meta (I hate Meta but it's a big company), no StarLink, no Alibaba, no Tencent.
No nothing. The biggest EU software company is SAP for f--k's sake.
SAP.
Let that sink in: the biggest EU software company is ranked 65th biggest company in the world. There's, thankfully, ASML but that's it.
> ... which they are likely to pour into a new frontier AI lab in Europe. So potentially it's a big win.
Wishful thinking. I don't buy it for a second that it's going to be a "big win".
And France is a country that hates its rich with a passion: they'll now be seen as demons, not just for having sold to the US... But simply for being very rich.
People have no idea at which point we in the EU are totally screwed.
Why would these guys come back to France only to see their wealth confiscated? I certainly wouldn't. Screw the EU.
I hope nvidia does right by the community.
Edit to add: $13B should cover the S3 egress fees for a couple months :D
I think you mean hecto-millionaires.
(Ggml.ai is llama.cpp.)
Curious if the “I consider HuggingFace more "Open AI" than OpenAI” sentiment in that top comment will still apply with NVIDIA as the boss now...
Owning HF -- the discovery and distribution channel -- is one thing, but I think the biggest threat vector is the privileged access to HF platform data, that includes HW survey info and model download pattern. This can be a borderline anti-trust case.
Let me stop you right there…
Reversal would be "valued at 7B then valued at nothing", this is more like "nah, we want more" then "nah, we want more" then "yes, that's what we want :)".
This is the article you are referring to is this but your facts are wrong: https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/24/hugging-face-reportedly-in...
very few people can lock a vision and fight billions dollars with integrity. In tech they mostly end up shadowed. People like JB Kempf with VLC or Bellard. Maybe even Torvald or Jeremy Howard belong to this list of people who could have been way richer than they are now if they wanted to go against their visions and beliefs.
"When we started the company, a running joke with my co-founders was that we wanted to be the first company to go public with an emoji instead of the three-letter ticker when you go in the NASDAQ."
-- Clem Delangue (https://unsupervisedlearning.substack.com/p/the-future-of-open-vs-closed-source)Historically NYSE (and AMEX; thought of in this specific context as CTA) had a lock on 1-3 character symbols. NASDAQ (via UTP) had a lock on 4-6 character symbols.
For a long time you could tell where something was listed purely by looking at the length of the symbol it traded under.
This all changed in the late 2000s or so, so no longer useful information.
I honestly would leave the industry if one of the exchanges tried to bend the industry to allow an emoji in a symbol. The communication protocols essentially lock this at 8 character alpha. It would be a huge pain in the ass, for everyone, to change this just because some exchange wants to appeal to a potential listing.
Good thing “xn--zp9h” fits, then.
Not as common, again, as it used to be...but still exists.
https://www.nasdaqtrader.com/trader.aspx?id=CQSsymbolconvent...
** for those that don’t know: NASDAQ stands for “National Association of Security Dealers - Automated Quotation (service)”. It was forced into existence by the SEC. Prior to that there was only the NASD, who traded blocks of shares amongst themselves so that each individual security dealer could meet the needs of their customers. As the trading amongst themselves grew larger and larger, the SEC added progressively more regulation until finally the had to build the NASDAQ computer system, which nobody would even recognize today.
So again, they were always separate from everything else and did things that made sense according to their own needs. They were very different until they were no longer allowed to be different.
By that measure regional exchanges were their own beasts for a long time. The environment has definitely streamlined a ton since RegNMS was implemented and the exchanges consolidated a bit.
Even the technology stacks the current markets run are basically identical within three families of design (even the upstart markets, and even those that are not directly licensing technology from ICE, Nasdaq, or Cboe). Differentiation just doesn’t pay like it used to.
No one is silly enough to want the abomination of design that is Pillar, but the point still stands that technical differentiation isn’t really important in the way it was 15-20yr ago.
Honestly the problem is the ticker is too valuable advertising for the listed company, and since listings are not governed by a central regulator in the same way they are in Europe, for example, there’s always going to be this sort of friction about who is willing to bend the most to win the business.
Probably they became more popular/important specifically because tickers did not, which in turn is probably because there are so many countries/exchanges that a global exchange-driven namespace was never really feasible?
Easier, if somewhat more verbose, to use the three in combo to identify. Helped somewhat by the message volumes being a small fraction of what they are in the US. Less need to optimize on a per order, or per market data packet basis.
Also explains why FIX is more prevalent in EU markets than it is in the US.
EVERYONE said it was a bad idea but they kept pushing it. Repeatedly.
Eventually, smarter heads prevailed and they got rid of the idea.
NYSE (really the access stack that both NYSE and AMEX ran on; the name escapes me since it died back in I think ‘08) has for a long time included a completely separate field in their protocols to indicate classification (preferred, warrants, classes, when issued, etc), but CTCI just jammed it into the symbol field.
Edit: Just discovered via this post that hn posts, like the exchanges, filter out emoji
Ironically enough, reddit recently killed off old.reddit; you now have to log in, which defeats the point of old.reddit.com totally.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re...
Can I setup a forgejo instance, upload a bunch of open source models to it and get bought out for $13bln?
I fail to see the point of this. Their inference hosting is a joke (I don't think I ever had a working response from a "try this model" form).
Their brand alone surely is not worth this much.
So what are they paying for?
I worry the answer is, for control over who is allowed to distribute the weights. Nothing else.
But in the era of frontier models and hardware designed for fast model loading (eg: LLM on a chip) I can't imagine that this is worth so much. There's *a lot* of competition to improve Git LFS.
So while I agree with you that this plays a role I also have to believe that it's to understand model usage by competition and thus stifle it.
You can't just spin up a VPS and throw a few brain jar's in; the network bandwidth must be a fortune. Hosting over 700GB+ for many of the same models has storage cost too.
HF has become the front runner in open model hosting. They have a lot of trust from the wider community. That's gotta count for something.
I'm not that familiar either, and so had same question.
I thought they just hosted other peoples models. So why the value of 13B?
More than anything, they are buying a position within the ecosystem. Many of us could get a version of an app deployed in short order that implements most core HF functionality, but I am sorry to say that this is very far from the "hard part" of building a business, and this was the case even before coding agents were a thing. It's no small thing to become the first tool pretty much everyone reaches for in a particular niche, and therefore the incumbent in that niche
And there's lots of inertia keeping companies and developers on these incumbents like HF and GitHub -- see also Microsoft's play here dumping billions into a company that is basically peanuts and probably nowhere near as profitable as Microsoft normally would like. But they bought it at a time when they were trying to make Microsoft synonymous with open source, and it was a great play to that end. Likewise Nvidia wants to be synonymous with AI. Even if HF is a loss leader, the positioning is probably worth it
To a lesser degree, Nvidia probably also might like to reinvigorate its flagging cloud compute business and this could be a natural way to do that. At least TechCrunch thinks this, but I, an overconfident layperson, feel that the positioning is where most of the value is for Nvidia, and consolidating that will act as a force multiplier for that + anything else they may want to do with this space
Code is hard but more likely it is a brand thing which is much harder to do. Nvidia for years now has tried to get a public ai model hub of sorts working. This is obviously them throwing in the towel.
It's such an obvious customer funnel they have been trying for years to make.
1. Customer googles "some model" 2. Hugging face is often top result 3. Thinks it's great 4. Buys
The customers are already on hugging face.
Acting like code is the blocker here would be very wrong. Nvidia 200% has the technical knowhow to make a hugging face platform and they'd likely make it better.
They are paying for an insurance policy. Elon Musk and SpaceXAI must be incredibly interested in buying the company who was the victim of a mass hacking campaign by OpenAI. Any lawsuit, criminal investigation, or slowdown of OpenAI's model training would put OpenAI's massive data center build out, which Nvidia just backstopped, at risk.
If Anthropic, OpenAI buy them, this org gets very different priorities, owning them ensures that doesn’t happen.
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.
Unless I’m missing something, this feels like Nvidia having more money than they know what to do with.
Google is obvious.
Hugging Face is a file download mirror with a couple of side features dangling off.
Pretty nice dangling side features apparently.
I can't see this as being as good of a purchase, especially when it's 13x the price of what was seen as an absurdly large amount back then.
Nvidia has a market cap of $5T USD today, and a decent chunk of that is due to LLM speculation.
Does Nvidia want their stock price to be at risk of being tanked by a download service being in the news? No, they want to make sure the party keeps going and is under their direct supervision, and part of that is making sure Hugging Face isn't bought by a competitor or runs out of money.
–Some guys in every bubble I’ve witnessed.
I get that it's fun to be glib about the stupidity of tech elites and investors in general, but Huggingface have been pretty open about their financials and are, in my opinion as a practitioner in the field, one of the most responsible orgs in our space. They've been a pillar of open source ML for years now and have made a very positive impact on our ecosystem.
Nvidia is getting a real business generating revenue, and the center of the universe for open models. Both seem like pretty valuable attributes, from Nvidia's perspective.
Or like GitHub, which was generating something like 200 million in ARR and had never hit profitability when Microsoft bought it for $7.5 billion back in 2018. I'm sure it has come as nothing but a happy surprise to Microsoft that GitHub generated $1 billion in 2023. They had initially penciled it in for 38 years til ROI.
Huggingface reached profitability 2 years ago. They've reportedly just started to touch the cash they raised 3 years ago. They have a tiered pricing model with metered pricing on resource heavy services. Seems pretty stable?
Your point about their user base is even weirder. They play essentially the same role for the ML community that GitHub does for software engineers, so I mean, yeah I'd pretty much expect their relationship with users to be "exactly like" GitHub's for the most part? They're where everyone has published their models for the last 6 years at least, going back to pre ChatGPT and the recent AI boom. There aren't realistically any other major model hubs, certainly not with anything near their footprint.
They also have inference endpoints with metered prices, and their spaces product (though i'd imagine this is a smaller portion of revenue).
Their lead advocate just posted this describing things: https://x.com/mervenoyann/status/2092924706508698025
To stop that! Literally. To stop those services being free.
> We make money via compute credits + Enterprise Hub + HF Pro subs [...]
I guess this plus custom inference deployments, external inference providers, partnerships with the big cloud AWS, Azure, etc.
I do worry about any sort of crowding out or downplaying non Nvidia-relevant quants, and about changing rules to crack down on models or datasets that for one reason or another “don’t align with their corporate values” - uncensored etc. Someone mentioned Microsoft and GitHub, they appear to me anyway to have been very hands off, I hope it’s the same model.
Has always been this way. Big companies always seek to buy fast growing startups and unfortunately the founders of these startups mostly take the money.
Didnt the US go through a antitrust phase phase where they ordered big companies to be broken up.
rant over.
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.
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).
And some former Roomba employees may have thoughts about Kahn.
IMO allowing Roomba to hit chapter 11 was still a better option for the consumer than handing them to Amazon. They’re still in business as an independent competitor on the market, consolidation was successfully avoided.
Yellen, I don’t have much of an opinion on, but she absolutely wasn’t alone in that opinion (the nuance of that opinion being inflated by this hyperbole), and the treasury is a lot less involved than the federal reserve in doing anything about inflation, anyway.
They are essentially on equal footing with other robotic vacuum manufacturers. iRobot didn't go out of business or get absorbed into a larger company lowering competition in the marketplace.
It's also not the FTC's job to ensure that companies, especially ones with zero/trivial national security or domestic labor force value, remain under domestic ownership. Amazon itself is not really a "domestic" company, it's publicly traded. Anyone from any non-sanctioned country can buy shares of Amazon.
Huh?
Robots with vision + sounds sensors and connected to the internet in professional homes across your country are definitely a security issue.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-05/robot-vacuum-deebot-e...
One of the leaked images taken by Roomba robot vacuums shows a lady sitting on her toilet - personal.
These companies are generally large enough that they do not need the competitive aid of buying an existing company and starting with that sort of structural advantage.
E.g., did Nvidia not have enough money in their bank to start a company to compete with Hugging Face? This is a company that reportedly has ~200-300 employees with investment rounds totaling $400 million. Nvidia made $31.9 billion in net income last quarter.
I look at a company like Xiaomi which just developed its automotive division in-house without resorting to buying car companies. I think our traditional business and finance mindset has an overreliance on acquisitions.
I heard (literally with my ears, during a pseudo-dinner-thing, so this may be apocryphal, so you may have to do some spelunking through sources) that Microsoft "bought" the source code of some browser-project, for a percentage of the revenues that come from Internet Explorer. The catch was that IE was bundled with Windows for free, so a percentage of zero is zero.
A definite fact, is that when Netscape folded, the industry -- and the investors that got burned by the rapaciousness of Microsoft -- finally got in-sync enough to lobby and agitate for the antitrust lawsuit that almost broke Microsoft up. A consequence of that lawsuit is that quasi-monopolies like Meta, Google, etc, started buying promising startups instead of burying them.
I am not sure that a world where Nvidia just out-spends Hugging Face, via its quasi-monopoly-revenues, is better than the one we are currently in.
If I have to choose between two evils, I'd obviously choose the lesser one. But maybe we can do even better, and choose the absence of evil?
Maybe companies should have "weight-classes" the same way that most sports have those, to match opponents. (After all, despite both being remarkable sportists, Koga cannot defeat Ogawa, who is a few weight-classes heavier). Something like this is how France protects (or tries to) its own small business owners (I am told, they still have many small independent bookstores, despite competition from Amazon, and chain-bookstores before that).
The venture-capital does _somewhat_ balance the scales, but not by much, and it encourages the pursuit of _exits_ instead of _excellence_ (not shaming anyone for taking an exit, I am just saying that the alternative is systematically penalized -- only the very lucky or very protected can pursue excellence).
Is either of those worse than what actually happened: the company is now a zombie brand for a Chinese company?
Amazon could email/push notification/text customers asking for reviews of iRobot vacuums but then not do the same for competing vacuums, skewing their reviews higher (asking for reviews boosts ratings by gathering opinions from happy customers who usually don't bother writing a review). Competing brands potentially don't even have your contact information to ask for a review.
Go on Amazon right now and search for "usb cable." There's a giant banner at the top that recommends the Amazon Basics brand, three across horizontally, which on my desktop monitor takes up nearly 50% of the screen real estate. Then below it are the Anker cables that you're more likely to be looking for.
They would have almost certainly been manipulating pricing on them as well. For example, they could take the strategy of lowering the price of the vacuums to break even or sell as a loss leader, but use them as a data-gathering robot in your house to help Amazon sell more of everything else. They could make their Alexa smart home platform preferential to iRobot or lock out competing models.
Robot vacuums are a consumer goods category that is heavily skewed toward Amazon.com as the place of purchase compared to other retailers.
I think "zombie brand owned by a Chinese company" is actually preferable, yes. They still operate and sell vacuums competing with the other robot vacuums on the market, and they aren't in service as household data collection bots for a monopoly e-commerce platform.
I don't think the ownership of the company being foreign or domestic is very relevant to the FTC's goal of preserving positive trade conditions. Would we think the iRobot situation was a bad outcome if iRobot was purchased by a foreign company we view more positively like Miele? We only think of it negatively due to anti-Chinese bias. iRobot being Chinese-owned is almost certainly the best possible outcome for preserving the amount of competition in the market.
I spent a little time working there around 2017. Whatever you're implying my former colleagues' thoughts on the subject are (or mine, for that matter), you're probably wrong.
Fear over economic damage due to immigration is perhaps the last remaining unifying force among the American political right wing. Biden actually did a lot of good things as president -- arguably a lot more good than he did in his time as senator. But his administration was too eager to just run the federal government as a quiet meritocracy and avoid dealing with any of the hot political issues of the day. He and his administration fucked up so bad that now not only is most of that good undone, but we are in a dire existential situation, facing generational-scale damage that might be unfixable.
It's one thing that they genuinely fumbled the handling of the huge immigration/refugee waves spanning the entire continent and it took them well over a year to start coordinating a response (which they never really did apart from eventually just closing the border) -- it's another that they kept trying to insist everything was fine, there was no problem, there's nothing to see here. People were freaking out about it all over the country, and of course they were being heavily propagandized, but that's not the point. A strong and proactive White House would have made all the propaganda look stupid. Instead, it looked like the truth.
It's absolutely mind-boggling to look back on just how weak the president had to have been from 2020-2024, to somehow let the party of Jan 6 and the disastrous handling of the Covid-19 pandemic regain enough control of the political narrative to make Trump seem like anything other than a narcissistic mobster.
If you maintain a list of shortcommings or good new features it could sound like a sweet deal.
If the company was aquired to shut it down it would work even better.
Marketing is increasingly expensive. Any hype is valuable. One might as well design the product for the promotion.
That is what will happen to torrents. Followed by VPNs. China, Russia and Iran had paved the way already.
Can't you see the puzzle coming toghether?
Have been for a long time. All of the big techs should have been broken up long ago.
If the House or Senate turn that might actually stop or slow down. The market falling by 30% when the AI bubble eventually pops would also trigger it.
The era of VC-funded home-delivery recipe boxes is still my favourite.
Its likely in the near future we will be able to buy 128gb mac minis and run local AI for free.
If Nvidia buying HF makes it tough for all the diverse models on HF, then what are some alternatives?
It seems models are the best things to be available on a Torrent platform? Of course HF is much more than just the files but perhaps the metadata can be separate and hosted on multiple community platforms.
good old torrents
It's less of a pain now that I'm not in my LLM newbie phase of trying to test out 30 different models and stick with Qwen, but I couldn't even try to download qwen 3.8 for a week or two until I got back to the city.
Starlink is the obvious option and I have it on my roof but I do everything I can to not pay that $170 a month vs my $170/quarter 5g service.
My primary concern is that Nvidia will bow to the pressure and restrict abliterated/uncensored models on HF.
That's the anthropics and openais of the world.
The problem for them is that the leading provider of training and inference is actually AWS...
Having Nvidia behind HF will now probably have a bunch of litigious entities salivating to sue them for not only allowing, but also distributing uncensored AI models that will then be used for deepfakes, porn, spam, scam, hacking, etc.
Sure that could have also been done to HF before, but I'm thinking Nvidia is a much juicier target.
Should also now be much easier for the government to just eventually force NVidia to restrict access to Chinese open models seeing as it will now become an American company that needs to obey to American law and we all know how American AI companies are lobbying for exactly that.
Using regulation to avoid having to be competitive is the American Way!
In all seriousness though, probably time to start an underground equivalent to HF.
Don't expect things to go differently this time around. Nvidia wants control over the software stack. Acquiring HF fits in perfectly. The play is long term.
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.
Whereas mojo is a general purpose language, and we're absolutely spoiled for choice on modern languages with open source compilers.
I'm not saying it's fair or right, I still think mojo is neat, but isn't exactly comparing apples to apples.
Nvidia on the other hand has not and the best they have done is a bunch of closed-source blobs which they do more closed source releases than the rest.
Mojo is open source and targets all GPU architectures for their compiler regardless of the vendor and nvcc targets their own (and both that and CUDA are closed source).
So this is directly an apples to apples comparison.
AMD is another story. Their binary closed source blobs were even worse than nvidias for many years. So much so people used terrible performance open source tries just to avoid the headache. That they finally slopped together an open source version after they'd lost the GPU race isn't exactly noble. But as an open source supporter in general, I commend the effort still.
possibly because it took qualcomm buying them to make that happen.
Mojo was partially open source before Qualcomm bought them, and they were going to do open source it anyway.
Was NVCC or CUDA ever open source since the lifetime of its development?
uh huh.
> Was NVCC or CUDA ever open source since the lifetime of its development?
you ever ask Nvidia why? i did.
Exactly. You're one of those that don't care.
Mojo's standard library was open sourced a year before the acquisition.
> you ever ask Nvidia why? i did.
The correct answer to my question is "No". CUDA or NVCC was never open sourced during its lifetime.
Since you "claim" to have asked them and know the true reason why is not open source, just say what Nvidia told you verbatim right here.
Intel and AMD have no problem open sourcing their GPU drivers for Linux, but Nvidia has a problem with that.
We can only speculate that "open sourcing" it reveals their GPU trade secrets and their intellectual property for others to copy.
If it was going to "eventually" be made open source, why not do it from the start? Why not do it a year in?
From what I was told, your speculation is incorrect. I can't say anything more than that, sorry.
I don't know why you're so aggressive in tone towards me, chill out.
> If it was going to "eventually" be made open source, why not do it from the start? Why not do it a year in?
That isn't how open sourcing software works. It gets released when it is ready or gradually.
But of course as I predicted that you would ask that question. Why didn't Linus release Linux immediately? Why did he wait 29 days to do it instead of the day when he announced it? Why didn't Rust release 4 years early as soon as is was eventually open sourced?
> From what I was told, your speculation is incorrect. I can't say anything more than that, sorry.
Who told you? Nvidia directly?
The correct answer is that you do NOT know the reason yourself because there was NO discussion at all.
Just say you don't know.
I'm going to skip past all of your asinine aggressive response and just answer one thing again since you missed it the first time...
> you ever ask Nvidia why? i did.
So that was not even open sourced “from the start” either.
You understand that you just undermined your own point? It was released when it was ready, rather than from the start.
The entire point is one company gave a gradual open source release over several months to a year, verses another company that has open sourced close to nothing related around CUDA or nvcc for decades.
nvcc remains completely closed source despite it even using Lattner’s LLVM (which he open sourced) as a dependency! (shocker)
> I'm going to skip past…
Exactly. Skip it because you seem to be struggling to answer those basic questions.
Nothing was missed as I already responded to your last sentence by asking you to post exactly what Nvidia just told you verbatim since you claimed to know the true reason. You failed to answer.
If that is too difficult then a paraphrasing is far better than: “I can’t for just reasons.”
Or just be honest and say: “I do not know the reason”.
Nope. It was released when they realized we were building something that was going to be competitive with theirs. It was viewed as better to join forces than do it separately because we were already helping them design the servlet spec.
> you seem to be struggling to answer those basic questions
I have yet to see a question, just a bunch of ad hominem. You really have some weird personal beef with me. Seek help and support for your anger issues.
The rest of the details to this are irrelevant. We already know that it was not open-sourced 'from the start' and as you just admitted, it took a week to get it ready and transition it from closed to open source.
So even with your example, it fails your own qualification for a project to "eventually" be made open source.
> I have yet to see a question, just a bunch of ad hominem. You really have some weird personal beef with me. Seek help and support for your anger issues.
I don't think you even know what an 'ad hominem" is or even realize that you just did one in your own comment as a distraction for not answering a basic question. But I'll remind you about what that question was since you missed it:
"Who told you? Nvidia directly?"
These are very basic question(s) that you are really struggling to answer. In this entire thread, you could not even give the real reason why Nvidia never would open source their CUDA or nvcc software when you "claimed" to know.
So again, Repeat exactly what Nvidia told you right here, given you claim to know the "true" reason or just say "I don't know".
The only struggle is your understanding. Maybe english isn't your first language, but that is me saying I asked Nvidia.
No you did not. You are referring to a question that I already answered for you [0]. Your answer was incorrect.
>> The correct answer to my question is "No". CUDA or NVCC was never open sourced during its lifetime.
> The only struggle is your understanding. Maybe english isn't your first language, but that is me saying I asked Nvidia.
Says the person that does not know what an "ad hominem" was nor did you even realize you just did one in a previous reply. The question I am basically asking you is to elaborate on what the true reason was since you claimed to have asked them (Nvidia).
If Nvidia gave you their response, It should be very easy to just say it right here word-for-word or paraphrase what they told you then. Many replies later still, you are struggling to even do that.
Such as basic question to answer and yet you continue pretending to know the reason when you clearly don't know.
this is the crux - if nvidia makes it so that open weights end up running better on nvidia hardware than competitor's, then it's going to prevent hardware innovation and competitiveness in the entire sector.
It's like as tho General Motors buys out oil refinery to make gas for all, but the gas somehow runs smoother in GM cars.
Couldnt they just take those models anyway?
NVidia is delivering commodity hardware to the hyperscalers, and would eventually get commodity margins (when hyperscalers make their models work on their own hardware).
Amazing article on relevant economics of squeezing vendors - actually about antitrust ad-models but:
The answer is that [advertising based] companies are an ideal test case for an increasingly common business meta-model, where companies try to create a consumer surplus at one end in order to maximize their negotiating leverage for capturing the producer surplus everywhere else in their supply chain.
Perhaps not relevant to huggingface, sorry.
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.
In fact, has HF ever wished to make money? They probably pay AWS more infra cost than they earn. The exit was planned all along.
But more seriously, this is my first time seeing that as well, and I'm not sure I like it. Citing an LLM is a little like citing Wikipedia to me, you cite the primary source the LLM is quoting directly, not the secondary source.
It may as well say "(Socrates, probably)"
Your reference lacks authority, veracity, and reproducibility.
They even share many of their pre-training and even post-training datasets for Nemotron on HuggingFace; for example: https://huggingface.co/datasets/nvidia/Nemotron-Post-Trainin...
Which other lab shares this?
Yes, there is no question NVIDIA wants to lock you into CUDA and their hardware. But also, they’ve consistently demonstrated the most openness when it comes to model training, datasets, and research; even before the LLM era (e.g. StyleGAN).
There’s also modelscope.cn (china’s huggingface) which is worth checking out. I would not be surprised if one day, we have to use China VPNs to download open weight models.
They supported OpenCL when Khronos floated the idea of a GPGPU standard to manufacturers, but OEMs didn't want to design scalable hardware or sponsor the software.
Of course they are. They're commoditizing their complement.
I want to own the hardware, not play around in an nvidia fiefdom full of nvidia rules.
If you don't want to use CUDA, they expose the PTX bindings to write your own CUDA alternative too: https://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/parallel-thread-execution/index...
Also, when running OpenCL, NVIDIA hardware disables multiple DMA engines, and allows only one memory transfer at a time to prevent OpenCL running as fast as CUDA.
Did NVIDIA finally allow open source drivers to access all parts and features of the card to allow feature parity? Last time I checked they were considering a plan for planning a solution to that.
Having said that, I'll try compiling a OpenCL 3.0 program in the cluster, so I can report whether NVIDIA runs this software, and if yes, how well.
Likewise SYSCL although built on top of OpenCL 3.0 primitives, is mostly Intel, which also owns CodePlay, the company that delivered the first working SYSCL compute experience, again neither AMD nor Intel (until it bought CodePlay).
I don't think bits like the GSP firmware will ever be open-sourced, but the opportunity to write better OpenCL drivers has always existed. Some of Nvidia's other proprietary driver backends (eg. GBM, Vulkan) are also decently neglected, but mostly out of disuse rather than malice. I don't think any of these things mean you don't own the hardware.
Nvidia probably likes that ASML is a monopolist (it's called a monopsony). The price is high and Nvidia can't scale as hard as they want to (more general: capital intensive market). This monopsony makes sure that other chip companies can't rapidly scale up and try to beat Nvidia. That there only ever was one other GPU firm (I'm prehistoric; once there were more) and they bungled it on software, is pretty sweet for Nvidia.
On the side of their customers. It would be best for Nvidia if there is free competition for the outputs generated from there GPUs. This maximizes consumer surplus and thus demand. Maximum demand for tokens, is maximal demand feeded in their monopoly. If there is a monopoly right from you, demand is curtailed, and your value is limited.
And that exactly is why you see interest from token generators for chips. Bridge that moat and gain a larger value surplus. Both NVidia and, say, China actively undercutting the token-supplier value chain is quite interesting to watch. It's like the Opium wars with us as somewhat happy customers.
In this same vein, why isn't ASML raising thousands of billions for building their own (subsidiary) chip foundries, while raising prices and starving the market (a little) for their machines.
You're looking this purely through an economic lens, while in reality geopolitical factors play a huge role in what ASML can and cannot do. The US government would likely take an extremely dim view of any new external competitor popping up for their chip foundry industry (especially with all the new US plants being built or planned) and would lean heavily on their vassal/ally the Netherlands to prevent this. Unlike with China, the US has more leverage over the Netherlands[1]
The US security state and US tech giants are joined at the hip, as they have been since the beginning of Silicon Valley[1], right through the Snowden revelations through to the present day[2].
[1] https://nltimes.nl/2026/08/20/us-preparing-force-netherlands...
[2] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/sect...
> Of course they are. They're commoditizing their complement
Then why don't they sell consumer GPUs with tons of memory. They clearly segment the market into consumer versus server/business.
There are a few problems though, primarily, a GPU with lots of VRAM and very high bandwidth is inherently very expensive (on top of which there is also the CUDA premium); AI use cases are better served by SoCs with lower (but still high) bandwidth and more RAM.
No shit Sherlock. Name one company that shared their code to make you NOT to consume their stuff?
It’s a little like the trend of calling developers “engineers”. There’s no actual engineering in the traditional sense but I’m sure developers think it sounds cool to call themselves that.
My point was just that I just find it amusing that people call themselves engineers when the code they produce is so far removed from the level of rigour one would expect in literally any other engineering industry.
I say this as someone who also has family and friends who are actual engineers, if they built bridges and buildings to the same standards that many developers write code, then people would die.
This isn’t meant as a criticism of developers, by the way. Just an observation at the vast differences in the domains and thus the tolerance for errors in the process.
Likewise for labs. I’ve worked in AI startups and the science departments are not something one would think of when you say “laboratory”. I get why the term is used, but it’s still amusing.
I know language isn’t static. It’s something that evolves, like how a “computer” used to refer to a person rather than a thing, but that doesn’t stop me from being amused. But maybe the real issue here is I take myself less seriously than others so I have that capacity to be amused by the titles I’ve held?
Just like everything AI is a "model". It's actually not, but it sounds cool/sciency.
It sounds cool because people in our age are almost obsessed with scientistic performance.
At least AI labs are actually doing experiments.
Dude, where's the src for GPU drivers and the firmware blobs?
Sorry, you can't say it is one of the most open labs without qualifying a proper response to the question above.
Nvidia is also one of the most closed hardware developers around. Two things can be true.
But it is a good example of people talking past one another and not communicating well, I would think.
Nvidia’s history with linux shows the opposite. And as a user running models on a linux/AMD stack, this information does not fill me with hope.
They might be right w.r.t. openness about LLM at the moment, but w.r.t. general software openness they are definitely the opposite of open.
Also if we were just discussing labs, Ai2 opens ~everything with dramatically less resources than Nvidia.
Sure, the models are open weight, but porting the code needed to run them on non-Nvidia hardware is not trivial.
A few years ago everyone said _Open_AI is the the most open labs. How did that turn out? Lots of coy, deceiving actions till the whole company was turned into whatever rent seeking amoral borg adjacent shell of it's former past it is now.
Evidently we should, because Linus has been more positive about Nvidia in the last 2 years [0]. I've been using the open driver for years now, for both gaming and CUDA.
[0] https://binarymusings.org/posts/talks/linus-on-ai-linux-in-k...
> This is actually one of the benefits brought by AI; it has made Nvidia a good participant in the Linux kernel space. [...] Now, when Linux is so important for AI clouds, Nvidia suddenly cares very much about Linux.
Now Nvidia is also premium sponsor of the Linux Foundation.
Nvidia is a big company. They are good about some things and bad about others.
I think they really do like open weights because they make some of the best hardware for training, and the more open weights models there are, the more people are training and fine-tuning them, mostly on Nvidia hardware.
I feel like Nvidia is one of the better choices for buying Huggingface. Not perfect, but definitely far from the worst.
1. Oracle
2. A16Z
3. GameStop
2. Microsoft
3. Google
Are probably the worst of the realistic options for acquiring HuggingFace
The worry is that Nvidia is trying to control the way you run those models. Trying to bake CUDA assumptions into model design, and pushing the software ecosystem to be as Nvidia first as they can.
They're trying to mix up the competitive landscape(that doesn't impact their bottom line, and I don't think opensource is eating their lunch), so I don't think this is fake, at least that's my initial take.
The only thing I can see them being able to get away with is increasingly bending the hugging face python API and any other features of that sort they develop to NVIDIA only. I personally don't use that and don't see a reason to and I am not sure how many people do use the hugging face python library.
They need to take a machete to all the cross coupling they’ve metastasized.
Nvidia wants people and companies to go choose a free open model, run that model on Nvidia hardware. And because Nvidia can't fully control what hardware an AI model can run, Apple Silicon and AMD hardware users will benefit as well.
Open weights correspond to "binary available" for software. Nobody would call that "open source".
(Even ignoring the licensing which "open source" normally entails.)
Though we agree that the term isn't typically used that way in the LLM context, right?
My impression I've developed in the years of working there is that Nvidia's relationship with opensource is... not intentional. They kinda suck at it because they genuinely don't know how to do it more than they want to make money out of it.
Here's an anecdotal "success story" which is also an illustration to how things might not work out well otherwise.
So, I was on the team that deals with server infrastructure. One day we get a new "feature" which was supposed to allow Slurm (the workload manager, a kind of software used to run "jobs", including eg. model training) to be deployed with distributed MySQL as a backend. The feature is all obviously written by a single developer with an enormous amount of "help" from AI. I was tasked with testing it.
Trying to figure out what it does... I realized that the "distributed" part of the feature was to be achieved by integrating with Oracle's MySQL by means of using MySQLShell (another proprietary Oracle's product). Until that point, by default, we integrated with MariaDB. Not only was it using Oracle's proprietary tool, the tool, actually, didn't support the "distributed" part of the "solution". It was pitched as the "first step on the way there".
So, I was able to push back on it, mentioning Galera, arguing that the "solution" doesn't solve the problem and will require from customers to change databases (even if they are mostly compatible... they never quite 100% compatible). And the misfeature was rolled back.
I made an effort to investigate how did we even get there, and turned out that whoever authored the "solution" had an experience of working with Oracle products, but never really tried the open-source ones. So, he didn't do a research. He just used what he knew.
Unfortunately, this is a rare win, where the evidence of disadvantages of using proprietary solution was huge and enough to turn the tide. But often it doesn't face any resistance because nobody is even aware of the problem.
I do think that they still might be a bit reticent to release fully open-source drivers, though, only because of the extent to which hardware design could be inferred from the driver source. OTOH, AI itself is making disassembling and reverse engineering binary code easier and easier, so there might not be much of a point to withholding the source in the near future.
> They want
[citation needed]
Their strategy for AI is pretty clear and they bank on on-premises OSS models for the busines, with their really cool open-source software: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmcn1-jFLWY
This is a really good watch and is a glimpse into what the actual future shapes up to be considering the current situation in where the OSS Chinese models successfully compete with proprietary US ones.
100%
"Quantized models are no longer permitted on the Hugging Face platform. Reduced precision models are a safety hazard and a violation of our TOS. Click here to speak with a sales representative about our many exciting cloud hosting offerings or enterprise GPU packages."
But selling more product is still on thr table until cloud AI starts the real cash drain, then therell be google like shenanigans.
The most important resource for self-hosting LLMs is now under the control of a company that has very markedly kept the specialized hardware outside of the broader public's hands.
These acquisitions are not healthy. They stifle competition and make it easier for governments to censor open weight models by choking off distribution points.
Nvidia has a deep interest in open source models to counter the LLM hyperscalers.
Nvidia also has a big bet on robotics and local AI, which requires model efficiency.
I'd worry far more about Dario and Sam regulatory capturing the US market via a "model safety" scare.
I wonder how much it's worth to Nvidia just to obtain a list of who's downloading which models and for what purpose. Similarly with the Stripe acquisition of OpenRouter. In the past, it would have been valuable to obtain an audience or market share or even a productive team. However, in this new age of the surveillance state ...
telemetry, orchestration, and financial
So either way they win.
Reminded of this discussion from a few days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49389372
We have the techno-feudalism and dystopia but none of the cool aesthetics from cyber punk or arguably even the real Zaibatsu. Nvidia isn’t cool, there’s no interesting aesthetics or back story, it doesn’t appear to have zaibatsu ambitions, it’s just riding a meme stock bubble.
In a different world I can imagine SpaceX to be the only thing that could come close, but well...
2. I think it will happen much sooner than 2245 given how easily capital and the rich are able to move around the globe in 2026 (compared to 1945)
If a CEO cannot personally get richer by cutting wages, cutting staffing, and outsourcing; all of it stops. That was the secret of affordability. Don't let a thousand rich people own everythjng. Tax them so we can have millions of working millionaires instead of 900 non-working billionaire elites.
As those 1950s taxes and post 1929 financial regulations were cut in the following decades, the wealth inequality that led to the great depression has returned.
If you want to judge the net effect of tax policy over time, look at the percentage of GDP captured by federal receipts (the vast majority of which are taxes). In the U.S., it's averaged ~16.5%-~17.5% with occasional spikes and dips. Currently, it's very close to what it was in those 90%-marginal-rates 1950s.
People have a right to support candidates > they can print a sign and stand on a street corner > printing signs costs money > people have a right to spend money supporting candidates.
People have a right to assemble > they can stand on a street corner with their friends > they can hold a big sign together > they can have lots of friends and form a group and print a really big sign.
We want to encourage private business > limiting liability for owners who do not participate in the business would increase access to capital > we offer corporate forms that shield investors from liability > identity of owners may be kept confidential.
People complain about the wrong thing. The problem isn't that people are allowed to support candidates with their money, buy airtime, etc.. It's that companies have secret owners...
This was a major crux of Colbert’s “our lady of perpetual exemption” bit. People absolutely know about the shadowy machinations CU enabled. The lack of transparency is a major critique.
To say that repealing CU is the solution is to allow the critique to go unresolved, while arguing ~"People shouldn't be free to support political candidates."
Corporations only have the powers granted to them by the state. Contributing to politics need not be one of them.
No, state's cannot e.g. discriminate on the basis of race by allowing corporations only composed of certain races. States also cannot infringe on the right to assemble or speak, by prohibiting people from supporting political candidates when they are organized as such a group.
But, generally, yes. States can require that the owners / members / corporate books / etc. of a company be disclosed publicly. If owners don't want their books disclosed, then they can forego the immunity that the corporate forms provide.
Corporations no.
Democracy is built on the idea that people are equal and have equal rights. This is only sustainable if the power differential between people isn't too large.
Corporations consist of people, yes, but the power to control where the efforts of these people are directed is concentrated on very few people, giving those people a large amount of power -- so large that without any checks on their influence on government, it undermines democracy.
It's the same argument for why super-wealthy individuals are so problematic. They're literally destroying the fabric of democracy through the power imbalance afforded by their wealth.
A corporation having contribution rights multiplies the otherwise imposed contribution limits on the underlying humans.
A corporation allows tax planning opportunities not afforded to the bottom 90-ish percent of the country (such as shifting income to alternate years to avoid progressive taxation, and utilizing expenses to lower that income in ways a W2 cannot)
Corporations are granted benefits that people do not get, and CU disturbs the balance of power.
A railroad company also has a huge amount of steel roads with cross country right of ways. You could fire everyone, and it'd still be extremely valuable. It might even be more valuable.
Even in asset-lite software land, "Atari" the name still has a lot of value, even though none of the people are there anymore. They own the right to control the things that the neurons in millions or billions of people's brains are tied to, that their habits tie them to.
Twitter, you can fire almost everyone, make the online square less pleasant for a lot of the people, the network effects truck on. People continue to use it even as they hate using it, because most everyone else is.
Only natural persons should be able to contribute to political candidates.
Corporations can lobby, as a corporate person, just like a union or other organization, but not contribute.
They can run ads themselves, but there needs to be a much greater wall between PACs and candidate campaigns, with the previous restrictions now null and void due to lack of enforcement.
If it's okay for Corporations can run ads themselves, then your objection isn't to wealthy people supporting candidates or even them doing so secretly, but... only when the little guy pools donations and they happen to be pool donations via a corporation?
Candidates should only accept funds from natural persons, that amount should be limited per person.
PACs and other candidate-adjacent activities should require 100% transparency on the source of funds and not be allowed to co-operate/co-ordinate with any candidate's campaigns. Companies can fund PACs, but they should be required to receive shareholder endorsement and not co-ordinate with their employees.
Laws impacting on the 1st amendment require strict limitation on how the government legislates and for an explicit need.
In this case, it is to ensure the integrity of the political process of selecting candidates and electing members of Congress.
The problem isn't "corporations can do the same thing as people."
The problem is anybody (solo or as a group) can legally run an unrestricted indirect campaign.
Elon can do the same, or more, as an individual than just about any corporation. That's just as problematic as Ford or Meta buying an election.
Dark money contributions are a closely related problem that we ought to fix at the same time.
> People have a right to support candidates > they can print a sign and stand on a street corner > printing signs costs money > people have a right to spend money supporting candidates.
Individuals printing signage is not where most of the funding is going though, is it?
> People have a right to assemble > they can stand on a street corner with their friends > they can hold a big sign together > they can have lots of friends and form a group and print a really big sign.
This isn't how most of the money is being spent either, is it?
I don't know how you seem to either believe the point of the right to free assembly was to give richer corporations more sway, or be completely oblivious to the fact that that is what's actually getting people angry, not the fact that citizens want to stand with signs by the street corner. Assuming you don't have a conflict of interest leading you to that conclusion, I... don't know what to tell you.
Fundamentally it sounds like your complaint is that wealthy people are presumably more able to be effective with their efforts than folks who, e.g. can't afford as big of a bullhorn.
Citizens United wasn't about that. There wasn't a law saying no person shall spend more than $1k/yr supporting a candidate.
Speech is speech, and what people forget about the First Amendment is that it prevents the government censoring their speech.
I was puzzled by the comments on the openrouter acquisition saying "they're just a proxy" - they're an open marketplace where models compete head-to-head, they're quite a bit more than just a proxy.
Hugging Face has essentially become github for model repositories and I think nvidia wanted to snag that before microsoft does.
Given that most of the weights are from Chinese labs and teams, I'm surprised China's own ModelScope hasn't leapfrogged HuggingFace.
They run a proxy for LLM providers, which inevitably creates a marketplace. They’re amazon.com for tokens.
The flip side that others are pointing out is that Amazon is sticky because there’s a sprawling, physical logistics apparatus underneath. You can’t replicate amazon.com’s business without billions of dollars and a decade of building warehouses.
I don’t see where OpenRouter has that. As far as software goes, theirs doesn’t seem particularly tricky. LiteLLM does vaguely similar things, at least for organizations where managing accounts isn’t absurd overhead.
They were first, and there’s money to be made there, but what’s stopping someone else from building LibreRouter that charges a 3% or 4% fee instead of 5%? That’s where I get dubious of their valuation.
I'm ready to be wrong but doesn't this describe basically every tech acquisition for the last 25 years or longer?
Pull requests, CI platform, authentication that is not PAM etc.
A lot of work maybe, and required a vision to do so initially. But straightforward work that MS could easily do it, and of course other small companies have replicated it too.
Nvidia is heavily invested in OpenAI, recently guaranteeing a datacenter buildout up to $105 billion dollars.
Any reasonable criminal investigation into OpenAI's actions or negligence into this incident would hurt their reputation, their ability to raise money, and therefore Nvidia, who is invested in them.
If I was a founder of HuggingFace, I am immediately getting in contact with Elon Musk and SpaceXAI, and letting him know how that he can purchase them and sue OpenAI, this time with solid claims.
If I was particularly amoral about if I think OpenAI or Anthropic should get to AGI first, I would take this bid to Nvidia, whose entire stock price is propped up by OpenAI's over-purchasing of compute.
They have network effects and strong brand recognition, both of which are hard to replicate.
NVidia have been making lots of moves recently towards supporting open weight models and local AI, and it makes sense for them to buy HF who support the same, if for no other reason than to prevent someone else like Musk buying them just to shut them down, although I assume they have plans to do a lot more than just keep HF alive.
Just out of curiosity, how did Hugging Face have the money to run that operation?
In all seriousness, isn't it pretty straightforward to quantize a model locally? I can do it using mlx in one command.
I see this as NVidia placing 50% of their bets on local models as the future, which it seems may be more profitable to them than cloud (sell 100/whatever local cards, which see 40hr/week max utilization, vs one cloud card seeing 24x7 utilization).
NVidia seem like a smart company - if they want to promote this direction they are not going to cripple it by trying to limit quantized models, even though you might expect them to promote benchmarks showing the benefits of larger and less quantized ones.
It's like the smart Intel of old - support CPUs all all price points, while also promoting CPU hogging applications like OpenCV.
The optimal market strategy there (as in a lot of places) wasn't "sell as much as you can". There's often a superior strategy, when (as with HPC) you have minority industry customers who are very rich and have low price sensitivity. It's to raise the price to what those special customers are willing to pay, and to drop everyone else.
What NVIDIA did was to rip out FP64 capability, systematically, from all of their consumer cards. They firewalled off "useful for GPGPU" as a differentiating feature, segmented the market, and astronomically raised the price of what (if you were looking soley at cost-to-manufacture) could have been easily affordable to any ramen student.
(It's a more obscure version of the Intel-made-ECC-memory-disappear story).
See, e.g.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47068890 ("15 years of FP64 segmentation, and why the Blackwell Ultra breaks the pattern (nicolasdickenmann.com)")
True about Intel and ECC, but AMD now does similar things, even with their consumer CPUs and chipsets.
These three companies now make very sure that consumer products can never canibalize those juicy data center profits - so they make sure to limit what the consumer segment can do.
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.
In the case of GitHub, it was likely for data reasons + wanting to own where developers do work (VScode + Github).
In the case of HuggingFace, honestly not sure as I'm not familiar enough with their business. But I can assure you that Nvidia didn't buy them for 13 billion cause HuggingFace were desperate. When you're desperate, you sell for less not more.
From Nvidia's side? You get to keep the shell game of where your money and hardware are going spinning on the table for a little longer. If the party stops, Nvidia loses a zero right off their valuation instantly.
And, as a side benefit, you get to place your thumb on the scale of the open-weight hosting ecosystem. And maybe even fund a Chinese Anthropic or OpenAI at a discount.
OpenAI just popped out an inference ASIC. Google is on their 8th generation of TPU. Graviton is out from Amazon. The hosting companies want Nvidia out of their finances. Full stop. Nvidia has to do something, or it's going to get swept away.
> Here have some of my monopoly money I can print and come join us at Nvidia!
In this case, Nvidia wants the easiest route from:
find model -> adapt model -> optimise model -> run model
to terminate inside the Nvidia stack. This is a boon for DGX cloud.
The party is a is a relatively small concern compared to the openness and github comparisons, but since no one else mentioned it, I hope something like it happens again. Or maybe that moment has passed.
Very optimistic to say this will not have profound effects on the whole industry.
Just now I got my hands wet with local LLMs before this was announced. Can somebody from llama.cpp/ggml.ai confirm this?
So instead they sold themselves to the same investor completely ?
Nvidia don't share CUDA, don't open source their drivers, don't support capable but older hardware (forget Pascal etc), and generally charge a premium over competitors for hardware.
This acquisition will likely solidify this general stance, reduce free compute allowance for a subscription, cap downloads, push advertising, generally favour models that are Nvidia prescribed or have been sponsored, and potentially ban models and datasets that are deemed risky legally (abliterated etc).
I see no other reason why Nvidia would want this kind of vertical.
Commoditize your complement.
They care about their high margin GPUs being the dominant platform, otherwise they would have to reduce the price of their gpu/increase vram amounts.
Nvidia are making truck loads of money and want it to continue
That said, I share all your concerns. The days of a permissive hands-off HF may be numbered
Now the Open-Models crowd will try to move to some other place. But fragmentation will weaken the position. Yes, there is Civic, there are purely Chinese websites ... for those who speaks Mandarin. Which only reinforces the point.
Closed Core: Driver, compiler (nvcc), runtime, assembler (PTX/SASS). Closed Libraries: cuDNN, cuBLAS, OptiX.
Open Libraries: CCCL (Thrust, CUB, libcudacxx), CV-CUDA (Vision), CUDA-Q (Quantum). Open Tooling: CUDA Python bindings, NVIDIA Kernel Module (Linux driver outer layer).
Nvidia is working with Red Hat to develop the NOVA driver and with Valve to develop NVK, which will be the future open-source drivers.
Nvidia supported the Pascal architecture for 10 years. No other graphics company did that. AMD recently made the RDNA 2 architecture legacy after only 5 years.
Nvidia is that most promotes open models and contributes significantly through Nemotron and various hardware-level optimizers. I think the value has more to do with the potential dominance of the open model ecosystem.
Apple's devices have resulted in a great increase in quality of life for myself and family members who used to waste a lot of time with Windows drivers/BSODs/random updates/malware/etc.
It's been almost 20 years, and it's turned out OK.
works fine for now
whats nvidia gonna do except make it worse?
usually buyouts go something like this:
1 buy company
2 fire various people
3 enshittify
hugging face even said they didnt want to accept a 500 million dollar investment from nvidia, because they didnt want nvidia to run the ship.
instead they sell it... guess who'll run the ship?
https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/24/hugging-face-reportedly-in...
1) Local inference means more general GPUs and less ASIC hardware. Only big companies can push ASIC because of the software required, meanwhile nVidia owns cuda which is the standard.
2) Local is less resource-efficient per chip (chips remaining idle much more, meaning more chips required).
3) End-customers have less bargaining power compared to hyper-scalers. Although this might change if customer hardware start behaving more like phones (SoC with everything packed in), but even then the SoC makers will likely still have less bargaining power than hyper-scalers. But then nVidia could potentially make the whole SoC too.
So overall local-inference users = higher profit margins for nvidia. They much rather have every business on the globe buy one nvidia rack (or every laptop have a beefy GPU) than have 5-10 hyperscalers buy a few hundred thousand.
But the spending spree is probably coming to an end with the looming IPO's and NVidia is probably trying to hedge their bets by making themselves the sure bet once big-AI stops monopolizing RAM and everyone races to get their local setups.
But Nvidia is a terrible open source and consumer company. They gatekeep a lot and oftentimes it's only open source in name. Outside contributions are often slow-walked or rejected if they don't align with business incentives , and leadership is retained 100% in a couple of people from a certain country.
His other comments on Nvidia often contain expletives.
No, its not just a repo/index (they also have training, inference hosting, and they develop/maintain a bunch of core AI infrastructure software), and even if it was just a repo/index, replacing a bug centralized repo/index that used by an large community isn’t trivial.
This can only be bad news, Nvidia didn’t buy hugging face to be good custodians but for business reasons.
Let’s hope an alternative platform emerges and takes off.
Just a little bit longer and this whole "AI" insanity might finally be over! :)
I'm old enough to remember.
They worked with studios to optimize games for their hardware. I don’t think they went around sabotaging other companies hardware. They did what was good for them.
Why did competition not do the same?
AMD could’ve done the same.
While ATI and Nvidia never tried to implement a Glide emulation layer, several hobbyists did and 3dfx shut them down with legal threats
Were there any legal barriers to ATI/AMD or Intel implementing CUDA or PhysX on their systems?
No gamer had a problem with nvidia.
Many bought their mobos and video cards.
Mac was pretty hated, Steam was very hated, we didn’t bow to any software company.
Nvidia actually made hardware.
Your propaganda is so awful because it’s always obvious you have no experience
Everything I can find online is referring to this one source. That doesn't tell me if it's happening or not.
Thoughts on WebTorrent?
What should we do?
This acquisition should be blocked (and never will sadly), they now have both the incentive and the ability to influence a platform that's supposed to be hardware agnostic (and built trust over that) toward CUDA stack
Microsoft did the exact same with github, acquired stack agnostic platform, and turned it into a copilot/azure one
Surely anyone can take any piece of CUDA code and tell some LLM to port it to another platform and keep grinding till performance is identical?
Hugging Face->Nvidia ($13B)
Keep an eye on Exa. With local models and niche harnesses proliferating, they're going to need a way to search without everyone having to run their own index.
Google is an obvious buyer if they could get it past regulators. A Doubleclick-level addition of the agentic stuff they're bad at to the indexing they're good at.
Nvidia is the obvious less conflicted #2
Secret third option: Cloudflare. They're already the glue for so much of this stuff.
nvidia will become the next cisco - this can't last forever
In 2000, Cisco Systems became the world's most valuable company by selling the routers required to build the internet. However, telecom companies bought hardware much faster than consumers adopted internet services. When the monetization gap widened, hardware orders were canceled, Cisco's stock crashed by 80%, and the broader economy fell into a recession. If consumer demand for AI software does not soon match the trillions being spent on Nvidia's chips, a sudden cancellation of orders could wipe out massive amounts of stock market wealth tied to index funds
Nvidia is investing $1 billion in Poolside and paying $6 billion to license its technology and hire most of its engineers.
They are the elephant in the room, with their CDS sky-high. Sounds like they are opinionated on the whole AI thing, trying to drive this with open-source models, countering OpenAI using Jalapeno.
Looks zero-sum for the players.
All the while Google silently planning to get milk from all layers.
As battle lines get drawn over duopoly vs. open weight it’ll be interesting to see what Nvidia does. They definitely want a piece of more of the stack especially as Huawei chips become more and more of an alternative to cuda.
THIRTEEN BILLIONS for ONE THING.
The amounts are incomprehensible at this point. I don't think anyone can conceive of 13 billion dollars accurately, including the people brokering this deal, they're just thinking of bargaining chips and weighing them in comparison to how many they have.
A US billion is 1 000 000 000, a French billion is 1 000 000 000 000.
(French as in francophone, not exclusively from France)
BTW Instagram raised $50 million at the valuation of $500M, just 4 days before the Facebook acquisition. %100 return of investment in 4 days, I think that's insane.
Time to see how Jensen plays it.
The title is not the linked article’s title. It is the title of the first article in the description.
FWIW, “agrees” is a weird verb. Kinda sounds like they are doing this out of kindness and not their own interests.
If Anthropic and OpenAI makes their own inference hardware, this is a shot across the bow for making their business worthless.
Expect the next NEMOTRON to top the AI performance indices.
Slow, unreliable, unusable, long licenses that you have to sign and then wait.
I've used probably 3 times in 3 years.
I don't see the value... probably it has simply some users.
This feels like a similar leap of faith. One that is hard to believe in. Thankfully, I think Nvidia can keep the lights on here & keep this going. I don't think they have to do much, per se. But it felt implausible then to image an Nvidia that gave a shit about anyone else, an Nvidia that actually gave a flying fuck about drivers or upstream Linux or ecosystems that weren't entirely within their own control.
Similarly the upper quartile of succes here feels mostly like benevolent neglect. I think we can hope for Nvidia to just not mess up a good thing, for them to understand that this open model open ai universe hinges upon Hugging Face, and for them to pretty please keep caring about the existential risk of the hyper-ai'ers all building their own properietary models on proprietary hardware and leaving Nvidia behind some day, and HF being the hedge against being left behind.
Just in recent weeks Openrouter bought out by Stripe and now hugging face bought out by NVIDIA.
Is this really freedom and choice for consumers? No it’s the proliferation and nomination of big tech.
I feel like if Nvidia ends up turning into a bad actor, in terms of restricting/censoring models... another HF will spring up.
Why can't everyone on it just move elesehwere?
Guess the answer is scale, same reason folks don't leave twitter/x.
Right now it is a pain to find the correct incantation.
Always like that with Microsoft apologists
That page shows 99.5%+ uptime across all 11 of the services provided.
To do that at a small company world cost significant money.
To have it integrated and cheap for all those small shops is very valuable to them.
and again don't know how this is acceptable in 2026, for a paid CI service
and I'm not talking about 6 9s, I mean, 99.5% is terrible
it's 2026, not 2016
and that 40 hr may be that over 40 days you just have to randomly stop working if you depend on GHA for something
and why are other services not struggling like this?
The argument is that AI models trained on open source should include the copyright info for all projects blended into the weights. And since they don’t, it violates the terms of the license.
The copilot service and the training on open source would be the same if Microsoft hadn't bought GitHub, it would just be branded differently.
Nvidia has a strong interest in open source AI being a strong contender to proprietary models. They don't want a single AI company to win, as that company would then have enormous leverage over Nvidia, and could perhaps even erode the Cuda moat with their own chip spending.
They want the AI market to be hypercompetitive, with AI companies focusing on competing amongst themselves instead of with Nvidia on one side, and many self-hosters / small inference providers buying Nvidia GPUs for large open models on the other.
It's in Nvidia's business interest to be a good steward of Huggingface, while being a good steward of Github is at best incidental to the interests of Microsoft.
Why is it alarming for a shovel salesman to also sell plants?
Jack Donaghy: The only thing I will be discussing with the House Subcommittee on Baseball, Quiz Shows, Terrorism, and Media is vertical integration.
Liz Lemon: What's vertical integration?
Jack Donaghy: Imagine that your favorite corn chip manufacturer also owned the number one diarrhea medication.
Liz Lemon: That'd be great, 'cause then they could put a little sample of the medicine in each bag.
Jack Donaghy: Keep thinking.
Liz Lemon: [beat] Except then they might be tempted to make the corn chips give you...
Jack Donaghy: Vertical integration.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_integration
Anything else you care to throw at the wall to see if it sticks, just go ahead and assume I disagree with you given how our interaction has gone so far.
That's still vertical integration, you're just looking down the tube from the wrong end.
Suppose a company that sells PCs also makes CPUs. That's obviously vertical integration, right? CPUs are part of the supply chain for PCs. Likewise if they make SSDs.
But CPUs and SSDs are also complementary goods. They're both sold to PC OEMs in order to produce the downstream product, or end customers when they build their own PC or want to upgrade a component or two.
Entering both of the complementary markets is vertical integration because the obvious reason for a company to do it is to integrate the separate goods into a single offering:
> then they could put a little sample of the medicine in each bag.
But then they have a perverse incentive. You get a bag with five servings of chips and one serving of medication -- the first hit is free. And you shouldn't need the drug to begin with.
Linus would heavily disagree!
source: https://diginomica.com/kubecon-china-33-and-third-linux-long...
And I'm not so sure that Mac is out of the equation
And Nvidia hardware was running on Linux before AI as well...
> And I'm not so sure that Mac is out of the equation
Mac servers exist but anyone serious about running at scale isn't using them for a number of reasons, not least of which is that Apple simply doesn't make real servers anymore...
That could change.
Who says they don’t switch to hardware manufacturing for AI servers
They will be as free as the Washington Post after the aquisition by Bezos.
Wait and see is the only thing we can do.
nVidia driver sets quite low number for VkPhysicalDeviceLimits::maxTexelBufferElements. I don’t think that’s a hardware limit because I have D3D12 backend doing the same thing on the same hardware.
Vulkan performance is not great on nVidia. On all AMD cards I am testing, Vulkan 1.3 is the fastest backend. On nVidia however, D3D12 is faster despite tensor cores (WMMA / wave matrix multiply accumulate / cooperative matrices) are only available through Vulkan, D3D12 is using shader cores exclusively.
This is just one company. If other hardware is better and they don’t provide access to it, won’t people just leave HF??
Is this somehow more of a monopoly than I am imagining?
The acquisition sets up corporate interests to be able to increasingly drive it.
I hope better for Nvidia and hopefully it can be cleared up, and maintained.
But more importantly for business, if HF fails to use the upcoming ASIC inference chips for their ZeroGPU after the acquisition, their competitors using them might have an advantage.
The load increase from AI is definitely significant, but I think with proper investment they would not be having this many issues.
Institutional holders mass revolted at spacex getting into the basket.
AI costs more than having people do the work. Q2 CFO reaction proved that.
We're definitely better at maths than at promotion.
https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/26/nvidia-closes-in-on-huggin...
Ten months later they're selling the entire company to Nvidia for $12.9B. So much for not wanting a dominant investor ...
I pull weights from HF most weeks (Ollama, ComfyUI etc) and I suspect Nvidia aren't paying 86x revenue for a file host. They're paying for the fact that every README, notebook and workflow on the planet has a hardcoded huggingface.co path in it. It's the npm/PyPI of AI, and now the company that sells the GPUs also owns the registry that decides which models are easy to find and download
I don't think Nvidia will start deleting models. They don't need to. They just need to make sure the models that run best on CUDA get promoted, and the ones that run well on a Mac or an AMD card (or the "abliterated" finetunes) quietly get less visibility. Nvidia have plenty of form for this kind of segmentation (e.g. removing NVLink from consumer cards after the 3090).
The only alternative registry with any real scale is ModelScope, which is owned by Alibaba. So the choice for anyone worried about this is an American GPU monopoly or the Chinese Communist Party. Anyone know of a serious third option?
Hyperscalers and hardware manufacturers will absorb the overgrowth and hopefully (for them, sucks for us) settle at the top of the software value chain. The only way to make all the money poured into compute for the last 4 years pay for itself at any level is selling people and corporations on very inefficient software for the next couple of decades.
Not too different from what "the cloud" did to this market from 2015 or so...
VCs invest, no one can compete and those with the moats survive.
I mean, haven't you just described VC?
I mean for all the inefficiencies of the cloud, it solved a lot of problems. It also created a new category of problems but rarely does any particular technology arrive as a pure boon without it's own compromises. Despite it's issues and despite how hot ASS some implementations are (looking at you Azure) I think cloud infrastructure you can at least say does solve a lot of problems for a lot of firms. I can't remotely say the same for AI.
It has a lot of uses don't get me wrong, but not nearly the number being pitched currently, and I don't know that I've seen any that I truly can't live without. And at the prices that are going to need to be charged when we turn the proverbial profit lever... I mean I'm sure tons of huge software houses where shipping is all that matters, behind things like quality, maintainability, the sanity of the development team, what have you, AI code assistants will have a lot of uses and the company will (probably) pay for it. But I think it's a stretch to say it's even remotely as good a trade as Cloud infra was.
In the handful of years since we've gotten all these supposedly revolutionary tools, software quality has already taken a gut-punch, will no sign of that slowing down, quite the opposite. And that's not even going into all the AI features being crammed into everything that few, if any users want or use. In fact the obsession with shoving AI shit into Photoshop instead of fixing any of the issues that've been present in that software since ~2009 was the straw that broke the camel's back for me and I've left Adobe behind entirely, and I know for certain based on communities I'm in, I'm far from alone in that.
The goal is to increase return on capital.
Take a look at the historical developments of wage participation in global income, labor productivity growth vs wage growth, and so forth. It works very well. As long as the most capable laborers are paid well enough to go along, the rest of us have little choice. Especially after citizens united basically privatized American elections.
No one seems to get that you have to do a general strike BEFORE they lay everyone off. It's a gambit. But either you actually were all that valuable and you can get your job back if it fails, or you weren't and you finally acted in your own self interest.
Workers lose their ability to earn a living, but OpenAI and Anthropic become the gatekeepers to effectively all productivity.
I know I sound tinfoil hat here but I don't see how else the numbers work. The only thing full-priced, profit-earning AI can possibly be cheaper than is, in my mind: as much of the workforce's salaries and cost of benefits as it can manage to offset, put together.
It's a great plan if you're a CEO who can't see beyond the next quarter's earnings call. Less so if you want things like, just pulling from a hat here, a functioning economy, a stable society, the ability for humans at large to live. But it's not like the owning class hasn't been undermining all of that for the better part of 50 years anyway.
I genuinely don't get what the endgame here is, just AI's talking to AI's everywhere and somehow they think everything just keeps on making money I guess? But then again our current crop of oligarchs are pretty mediocre all around, so calling any of this a "plan" at all feels a stretch. Just cut costs every quarter, make the products worse, fire everyone who knows anything and sail off into the sunset making more money than any human being can actually spend in the process.
We can't discuss the finance of private companies so we have to wait for their IPO, acquisition by some public company, or bankruptcy to find out more.
The story written in the public numbers, from corporations or government statistics, is one of rise in factor productivity, rise in capital returns, and decline in wage participation in overall income.
I'm merely observing that it seems to be the latest chapter in the development of the capitalistic corporation.
>The companies have not yet reached a deal, and the talks could still fall apart, the person said. Business Insider on Sunday was the first to report that Hugging Face was fielding takeover interest.
I might host 3 or 4 models that I've downloaded recently, but I won't be hosting the 50 or so that I've tried in the last two years.
But if you don't pay a host to seed it, either the host's business model won't play well with torrents, or there's no host and a torrent will rot.
It’s all about the convenience, minimising the time and effort from “looks interesting” to “running the model”.
Nvidia don’t care if you do it on their cloud, someone else’s cloud, or on your own machine - they win either way, as it further propagates the technology on which they are building their future.
And now you've recreated most of HF
Because you can't host arbitrarily large files on github, it's basically become a defacto "publish your project here" thing.
For a CN domestic equivalent take a look at Modelscope.
https://openai.com/index/hugging-face-incident-and-the-road-...
You can dislike an entity or an action and still acknowledge it also had some positive effects.
Pretty bad tradeoff of course, improving the situation for non paying people while making it bad for paying customers.
But after the answers, I do think his example is poor. Models available at HF have many purposes and will run on many platforms. Commenters here are suggesting this will no longer be the case.
Whereas the example Workflow (iOS only) -> Shortcuts (iOS only), there was no change in that regard.
I'm not a fan of big-tech acquisition results either, but one benefit can be that a product continues to exist when it would otherwise become insolvent.
Nvidia is making tons of money by selling GPUs at a very high profit margin. They will do anything to remain dominant
Meanwhile, RAM prices still go up. I want my money back.
12-24 months from this acquisition will likely look like a crazy burn of capital and cash.
First they came for all the dev tooling - uv, Cursor, etc. Now the routers and providers - Open Router, Hugging Face...
Who or what is next? And what is the endgame I wonder??
> Nvidia Agrees to Buy Open Source Model Repository Hugging Face For $12.9 Billionthey basically own chips - data centers - discovery etc?
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.
It's different for their local counterparts, but the original companies?
Not just on this HF acquisition, but on the whole ecosystem monopoly.
It's comparable to the biggest bank buying the biggest ratings agency.