Nvidia's been pretty terrible for open source / free software. No need to quote Linus Torvalds here. They want to control what runs on their hardware. They want to you write code against their proprietary drivers and APIs, not directly against the hardware (which these days of course also contains plenty of software, but still).
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.
Potentially horrible for monopoly reasons, but if other big acquisitions in the AI era teach us anything, developers are about to get a whole lot of free and discounted trial credits.
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 failing to take advantage of the charisma of both Lina Khan and Janet Yellen, and not making them public-facing economics gurus like Alan Greenspan or Larry Summers historically were, was a huge tactical mistake by Biden.
Yellen was objectively the dumbest Treasury Secretary ever. When everyone and their dog realized inflation was getting out of control, she thought it was transitory. She literally gets an F- as an economist.
And some former Roomba employees may have thoughts about Kahn.
True, but better nvidia than any other big tech contender. Nvidia has a very strong business incentive to make huggingface thrive, whereas pretty much everyone else has the opposite incentive.
The more interesting is HF turned down a $500M Nvidia investment late last year at
a $7B valuation, after passing on a $235M round in 2023 at $4.5B —
going from "we don't want a dominant investor" to a $13B full
acquisition in under a year is quite the reversal.
Obviously, NVIDIA is trying to own the AI development chain.
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.
HF is the default platform to find models. Not just ones published by big labs but also a lot of the distilled or fine-tuned versions, etc.
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.
They have various paid services that relate to AI—paid inference hosting; paid accounts aimed at AI development with GPU rentals [credits plus paid overages, I believe], more private storage and public storage than free accounts; and many of the community a and some other benefits on individual/team/enterprise tiers; additional paid storage above the base quotas for the paid account tiers; on demand rentals of HF managed containers on GCP and AWS, and some other things.
I’m asking more to work out what is the basis of this valuation. Why would Nvidia spend $13B for what seems to be a services that gives things away for free.
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.
They don't need a business model to have value here.
They sell a few cloud services, but the most valuable thing in their portfolio is live, engaged accounts from pretty much every person directly interested in running AI models.
If you were an org positioned to do sell better cloud services on a wildly better margin, wanted to promote consumer-binned AI hardware from your manufacturing chain, or wanted to promote new AI enterprise or research-support initiatives, those accounts would seem to be an absurdly fantastic collection of warm leads that you could gradually mine and upsell (and critically: that your competitors could no longer buy/use themselves).
I guess we may have to start paying to download models.
Or perhaps they will start throttling downloads for free users.
I don't know what they business case is, it might be to shut them down: I suspect good free models on local hardware is a threat to Nvidia's investments in OpenAI/Anthropic.
NVidia has been expending energy helping improve local models and inference platforms for them targeting NVidia GPUs; good free models that users can run locally rewards Nvidia’s investment in product lines for local inference (DGX, RTX PCs, etc), as well as—given their continued dominance in the space—the premium over competitors of their consumer and workstation GPUs.
Maybe they're trying to see how big the market actually is before considering shutting it down, maybe or getting lawyers and politicians to try and outlaw or restrict open models if they see a big enough opportunity.
The open weights AI ecosystem is way too concentrated with HF. That said, it was clear they were going to either get bought or aggressively monetized at some point, Nvidia seems like it could be one of the more aligned acquirers.
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.
Same reason why GitHub was acquired for $7.5B at $250 million ARR which is 30x revenues:
VCs could not see any other reason to raise more money and Huggingface was not growing as fast as they thought to justify the valuation or the next fundraise.
So they might as well get Nvidia to save them from the VCs pressurizing them.
They were already pretty vocal about it, but this makes Nvidia pretty much the de facto face of open weight models.
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.
Nvidia is indeed a terrible company when it comes to open source, etc. however, as someone who has been gaming on desktop hardware since the 6xxx card days, Nvidia hardware has always worked. I switched to Linux full time since the 2XX days (maybe it was the 280 gtx?) and never had a lot of the problems everyone else got on Linux (using only the closed source drivers).
Likewise, their hardware has been rock solid and very performant for me. I bought most of my current setup second hand and they've been going strong for years now.
I think they will be, Nvidia has released open source model that also included the data it was trained on. I think they are the only ones that have done that.
Nvidia has already a good free offer with Nim and a lot of compute power available. Plus, they obviously have interest in spreading open models culture.
I'm puzzled by the reactions. This is not a good thing. Yes, they're releasing more open source code and models, but they do it BECAUSE OF pressure from the community and other open source projects.
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.
Linus isn't wrong but at the same time NV has shipped more compute than AMD and Intel combined to consumers. The kind of performance I get out of a modest outlay never ceases to amaze me.
Isn't it super easy for the community to just replace HuggingFace? Isn't it pretty much just a repo/index for open-weight models? Why is it even worth anything?
Not if they can't indefinitely contain ram and SSD procurement. And they can't and the Market already showed with specex that they are unwilling to float these fly by night outrageous 'investments' onto institutional holders.
Institutional holders mass revolted at spacex getting into the basket.
AI costs more than having people do the work. Q2 CFO reaction proved that.
HuggingFace offers abliterated/uncensored models, which would seem to run contrary to the "AI is too powerful for regular people" narrative that the big players are pushing.
My primary concern is that Nvidia will bow to the pressure and restrict abliterated/uncensored models on HF.
The story is in an intermediate state right now, but as semiquaver points out, The Information is reporting it as fact. Since their reporting tends to be as reliable as it is hardwalled, we went with their claim in the title.
Please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.
No doubt you have the nucleus of a substantive comment here, but that's not enough. If you only post the shallowest top stratum of what you're thinking, other people do the same, and then we get "Laws are for poor people" and endless descending repetition. The whole point of this site is to try for something other than that.
I thin HF holds huge power in how they’ve consolidated all the open models and data, but monopoly feels like a stretch here. They are in reality a fairly small startup with lots of alternatives (all of which are much worse at this point granted) and are mostly a loss leading part of the open source ecosystem. I think it would be very hard to make a case against this on monopoly grounds, though I wouldn’t be opposed to someone trying if they thought it was possible.
Nvidia's been pretty terrible for open source / free software. No need to quote Linus Torvalds here. They want to control what runs on their hardware. They want to you write code against their proprietary drivers and APIs, not directly against the hardware (which these days of course also contains plenty of software, but still).
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.
I think it's a plausible play that keeps the AI boom in session for a year or two longer.
Or at least, $13b to stay at the head of the race (or keep the race running) must be worth it to someone's desk.
There's only $50b in datacenter buildout nationally (Source: Gemini, 2026).
So it is a bit of a puzzling choice for what amounts to a pile of software, in my opinion. but I don't know shit.
Nvidia has hardly open sourced the nvcc compiler, yet no-one here is complaining about why it is closed source.
Modular on the other hand creates the Mojo compiler gets criticised for not open sourcing it immediately and now once they do, no-one cares anymore.
Huggingface was not just a target for open source, but as a force to have open weight models run better on Nvidia against the rest.
Potentially horrible for monopoly reasons, but if other big acquisitions in the AI era teach us anything, developers are about to get a whole lot of free and discounted trial credits.
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.
Yes. Great for devs, for a while. Awful for overall competition and industry's health.
I think the federal antitrust regulators are asleep.
Edit: antitrust regulators' job has just begun -- we'll see how this deal gets adjudicated by the FTC (if at all).
Except for during Biden, they've been asleep for almost 50 years.
Lina Khan @ the FTC was the best thing about the Biden administration, for me.
I think failing to take advantage of the charisma of both Lina Khan and Janet Yellen, and not making them public-facing economics gurus like Alan Greenspan or Larry Summers historically were, was a huge tactical mistake by Biden.
Yellen was objectively the dumbest Treasury Secretary ever. When everyone and their dog realized inflation was getting out of control, she thought it was transitory. She literally gets an F- as an economist.
And some former Roomba employees may have thoughts about Kahn.
I miss the Biden administration
Large numbers of people outside of the United States probably do.
the neo-lib world order?
No, just people that prefer the largest economy and military power in the world to be as stable as possible.
True, but better nvidia than any other big tech contender. Nvidia has a very strong business incentive to make huggingface thrive, whereas pretty much everyone else has the opposite incentive.
Especially when all major labs are building their custom inference chips.
> That’s at least a plus. I will happily burn through as much VC money as they will give me to tinker with my projects.
The era of VC-funded home-delivery recipe boxes is still my favourite.
Yeah this is the "early netflix" era. Take advantage while you can and plan for the future.
Well congrats to Clem and the team. I remember when huggingface was doing things like coreference resolution models on spacy.
I hope nvidia does right by the community.
Edit to add: $13B should cover the S3 egress fees for a couple months :D
The more interesting is HF turned down a $500M Nvidia investment late last year at a $7B valuation, after passing on a $235M round in 2023 at $4.5B — going from "we don't want a dominant investor" to a $13B full acquisition in under a year is quite the reversal.
Remember just 6 months ago that "Ggml.ai joins Hugging Face to ensure the long-term progress of Local AI" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47088037)
(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...
Obviously, NVIDIA is trying to own the AI development chain.
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.
HF is the default platform to find models. Not just ones published by big labs but also a lot of the distilled or fine-tuned versions, etc.
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.
What is the business model of hugging face? My understanding was they were basically just a file hosting platform.
They have various paid services that relate to AI—paid inference hosting; paid accounts aimed at AI development with GPU rentals [credits plus paid overages, I believe], more private storage and public storage than free accounts; and many of the community a and some other benefits on individual/team/enterprise tiers; additional paid storage above the base quotas for the paid account tiers; on demand rentals of HF managed containers on GCP and AWS, and some other things.
Didn’t we just witness it? Become a critical ecosystem player then get acquired based on the value of that position.
I’m asking more to work out what is the basis of this valuation. Why would Nvidia spend $13B for what seems to be a services that gives things away for free.
Talking about profit is so passé in the new economic paradigm. The rules have changed— it’s about how much a company is worth. Get with the times.
–Some guys in every bubble I’ve witnessed.
This gets mentioned a lot, but the most valuable companies, by orders of magnitude, have the most profit, by orders of magnitude.
> Why would Nvidia spend $13B for what seems to be a services that gives things away for free.
To stop that! Literally. To stop those services being free.
Risk management.
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.
https://huggingface.co/pricing
This is like saying GitHub or Google just gives away everything for free
Not really. GitHub has a strong platform of paying customers and a solid product that’s hard to replicate.
Google is obvious.
Hugging Face is a file download mirror with a couple of side features dangling off.
Whether you realize it or not Hugging Face's monetization is just as obvious as GitHub's
They hit 150 million in annual recurring revenue this year.
Pretty nice dangling side features apparently.
That still leaves the company valued at 86 years of revenue
Isn't this pretty much the model for any tech company? Rush to get MVP released, stoke the hype, cash in on FOMO.
They don't need a business model to have value here.
They sell a few cloud services, but the most valuable thing in their portfolio is live, engaged accounts from pretty much every person directly interested in running AI models.
If you were an org positioned to do sell better cloud services on a wildly better margin, wanted to promote consumer-binned AI hardware from your manufacturing chain, or wanted to promote new AI enterprise or research-support initiatives, those accounts would seem to be an absurdly fantastic collection of warm leads that you could gradually mine and upsell (and critically: that your competitors could no longer buy/use themselves).
I guess we may have to start paying to download models.
Or perhaps they will start throttling downloads for free users.
I don't know what they business case is, it might be to shut them down: I suspect good free models on local hardware is a threat to Nvidia's investments in OpenAI/Anthropic.
I see the opposite — NVIDIA is aiming to commoditize the model layer and push open models that are tuned to run on NVIDIA hardware.
NVidia has been expending energy helping improve local models and inference platforms for them targeting NVidia GPUs; good free models that users can run locally rewards Nvidia’s investment in product lines for local inference (DGX, RTX PCs, etc), as well as—given their continued dominance in the space—the premium over competitors of their consumer and workstation GPUs.
File hosting isn’t that hard to replicate though. Even if they start charging people will just set up torrents for the files or lists of mirrors.
Unless I’m missing something, this feels like Nvidia having more money than they know what to do with.
Maybe everyone will migrate to Hugging Bay for downloading models via torrent?
Maybe they're trying to see how big the market actually is before considering shutting it down, maybe or getting lawyers and politicians to try and outlaw or restrict open models if they see a big enough opportunity.
ondemand cloud? b2b?
I have never seen an acquisition be good for the users. I struggle to believe this one will be different
Acquisition of GitHub let to increased downtimes, but also to unlimited private repos for the free tier.
... Which gitlab already had before github. And still does.
The open weights AI ecosystem is way too concentrated with HF. That said, it was clear they were going to either get bought or aggressively monetized at some point, Nvidia seems like it could be one of the more aligned acquirers.
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.
There are always torrents, which would seem to be a fine way to distribute models.
We also have modelscope.cn, I'm sure that one won't get acquired
nvidia antitrust incoming
I am just curious, and I genuinely want to know, how is a 150 million a year in revenue company worth 13 billion dollars?
Same reason why GitHub was acquired for $7.5B at $250 million ARR which is 30x revenues:
VCs could not see any other reason to raise more money and Huggingface was not growing as fast as they thought to justify the valuation or the next fundraise.
So they might as well get Nvidia to save them from the VCs pressurizing them.
No, what? Did they just do this to make Chinese models harder to acquire outside of China?
The companies have aligned incentives so I don't think this is a terrible acquisition for customers.
That's a great news for a few rich wallets and bad for all of us.
They were already pretty vocal about it, but this makes Nvidia pretty much the de facto face of open weight models.
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.
The lowest hanging fruit that hf could offer is community monitored commands for running local models.
Right now it is a pain to find the correct incantation.
I hope they're good stewards. This reminds me of the Microsoft GitHub acquisition in terms of the importance to the broader community.
As someone who've played video games and obsessed over graphics cards long before this all started, don't get your hopes up.
as gamers, we got burnt by nvidia way too many times. I'm still holding grudge over shutting down 3dfx.
Nvidia is indeed a terrible company when it comes to open source, etc. however, as someone who has been gaming on desktop hardware since the 6xxx card days, Nvidia hardware has always worked. I switched to Linux full time since the 2XX days (maybe it was the 280 gtx?) and never had a lot of the problems everyone else got on Linux (using only the closed source drivers).
Likewise, their hardware has been rock solid and very performant for me. I bought most of my current setup second hand and they've been going strong for years now.
I think they will be, Nvidia has released open source model that also included the data it was trained on. I think they are the only ones that have done that.
Handing out digging spots if you are the shovel manufacturer sounds reasonable.
As long as the spots continue to be compatible with shovels from other shovel manufacturers
Nvidia has already a good free offer with Nim and a lot of compute power available. Plus, they obviously have interest in spreading open models culture.
Huggingface sold out. Sad day. All the good companies lose their 'dont do evil' clause as soon as they make bank
You've sold out when you became VC Funded... It's just a matter of how long the free punch lasts.
What, are you expecting them to just work for good vibes?
To be fair, this is the best thing that can happen for the founders. I don't blame them.
Fix your title it's not finalized yet!
According to The Information, it seem it's finalized? https://www.theinformation.com/articles/nvidia-agrees-buy-op...
So is the next step to just basically create a cloud business.
they basically own chips - data centers - discovery etc?
I'm puzzled by the reactions. This is not a good thing. Yes, they're releasing more open source code and models, but they do it BECAUSE OF pressure from the community and other open source projects.
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.
Linus Torvalds: 'Nvidia has been the single worst company we've ever dealt with'
His other comments on Nvidia often contain expletives.
Linus isn't wrong but at the same time NV has shipped more compute than AMD and Intel combined to consumers. The kind of performance I get out of a modest outlay never ceases to amaze me.
In fairness, most of those comments were made before Nvidia capitulated in the EGLStream war and released open kernel modules.
Isn't it super easy for the community to just replace HuggingFace? Isn't it pretty much just a repo/index for open-weight models? Why is it even worth anything?
Not just a repo/index but they also offer reasonably-priced compute, with a free tier not to sniff at, on which to run the models.
Network effects. It's like a social network for LLM nerds as well as hosting and rating models, etc.
It also means that finding models that aren't "approved" will be dealt by other websites.
good or bad, it comes down to a financial decision. Nvidia was willing to offer the highest bidding price, and HF was willing to sell.
What does Linus’s hatred of NVidia drivers imply for this situation?
I wonder if OpenRouter being acquired was a catalyst for this deal.
I'm more worry than positive tbh.
What’s with all the big acquisitions recently? Is it advantageous for some reason to announce all of this stuff now?
The VC capital for AI is probably drying up. Now the question is: who will buy OpenAI and Anthropic?
The public
Not if they can't indefinitely contain ram and SSD procurement. And they can't and the Market already showed with specex that they are unwilling to float these fly by night outrageous 'investments' onto institutional holders.
Institutional holders mass revolted at spacex getting into the basket.
AI costs more than having people do the work. Q2 CFO reaction proved that.
I’ve asked ChatGPT etc a few times how Hugging Face makes money. Never quite got to understanding . Good for them.
Gemini did a good job of explaining it. fwiw, it may have helped that i accused Gemini of leading me to a "scam site" like "mega dot com"
You could just go to their website and look at the pricing pages? Why are you asking an LLM?
HuggingFace offers abliterated/uncensored models, which would seem to run contrary to the "AI is too powerful for regular people" narrative that the big players are pushing.
My primary concern is that Nvidia will bow to the pressure and restrict abliterated/uncensored models on HF.
That is a very good point. I will set aside some storage and download those models that I think are most at risk from a corporate clean-up action.
I don't think nvda has ever pushed the idea that ai is too powerful for regular people.
That's the anthropics and openais of the world.
I wanted to pray for AMD to attack somehow but then I remembered their owner CEO's are cousins. Should we pray for Chinese GPUs?
Its becoming impossible to track all the acquisitions.
Big Wolf buying the sheep farm. Nice
Hold on, these say no deal has been reached yet.
Oh jeez
I really wonder why Nvidia would do this.
Owning the roots, the trunk, the branches and the tip of the leafs.
s-1.site
whoa
Just like that they lost their ethos. AI oligarchy in the US is now cemented.
This is huge!
um um um um do we want nvidia to be on the same network as hugging face given the recent incidents?
the title of this post is misleading… “in talks” != not “agrees”
It’s not misleading according to the The Information piece (second link)
The story is in an intermediate state right now, but as semiquaver points out, The Information is reporting it as fact. Since their reporting tends to be as reliable as it is hardwalled, we went with their claim in the title.
Anyone old enough to remember anti trust laws or even just laws?
Please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.
No doubt you have the nucleus of a substantive comment here, but that's not enough. If you only post the shallowest top stratum of what you're thinking, other people do the same, and then we get "Laws are for poor people" and endless descending repetition. The whole point of this site is to try for something other than that.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
p.s. Also, please don't be snarky on HN. That's also in the guidelines.
I thin HF holds huge power in how they’ve consolidated all the open models and data, but monopoly feels like a stretch here. They are in reality a fairly small startup with lots of alternatives (all of which are much worse at this point granted) and are mostly a loss leading part of the open source ecosystem. I think it would be very hard to make a case against this on monopoly grounds, though I wouldn’t be opposed to someone trying if they thought it was possible.
sometimes it is comments like these that make me wish hn had a block button
I mean you can easily write a browser plugin using AI to do that, there might already have been one.
what? why? seems pretty apt
The AI judge doesn’t have that feature yet
Laws are for poor people
tldr: the marketplace for opensource models became wide open