Posted by mfiguiere 3 hours ago
https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/24/hugging-face-reportedly-in...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Your reference lacks authority, veracity, and reproducibility.
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).
Have been for a long time. All of the big techs should have been broken up long ago.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I hope nvidia does right by the community.
Edit to add: $13B should cover the S3 egress fees for a couple months :D
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.
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...
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 :)".
(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...
–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.
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.
To stop that! Literally. To stop those services being free.
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.
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.
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.
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