Nvidia’s $13 billion bet on the AI ecosystem

Nvidia has agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, bringing the widely used hub for open AI models under a leading supplier of AI chips. Hugging Face is where developers and companies find, test, adapt and deploy models built by many different groups—a distribution layer that matters alongside the computing hardware used to run them. Nvidia says the platform will remain open to rival clouds, hardware and model makers, but the deal would still give it a role at nearly every layer of AI: financing and supplying builders, providing their computing tools, and now owning a key route through which their work reaches users.