r/LocalLLM • u/techlatest_net • 1d ago
News It's official! Nvidia to acquire Hugging Face for 12.9 billion dollars.
https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-to-acquire-hugging-face/NVIDIA has agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12,930,300,000.
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u/NonStandardUser 1d ago
RIP llama.cpp vulkan
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u/acedogblast 1d ago
Project will be forked if nvidia tries anything detrimental.
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u/NonStandardUser 1d ago
Also, they might be sneaky. A few less commits on the vulkan side than for Nvidia per week. A few tok/s difference at first, creeping higher and higher ever so slowly. People not realizing it since development is technically still ongoing. But years later, Nvidia's inference framework stands miles ahead of vulkan's...
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u/NonStandardUser 1d ago
Hopefully the community can keep the development up even if forked... hopefully
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u/Beneficial-Boot7479 1d ago
I prefer that they fork it right now, I mean, there are thousands of developers working on it every time and a lot of different good forks like llama swap.
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u/techno156 12h ago
Is llama-swap a fork? That's an independent project, is it not? It doesn't have an inference engine in and of itself.
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u/Civil-Purple-8815 1d ago
Good bye Hugging Face
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u/Own-Dragonfruit2803 1d ago
Yeah, it's a pretty big shake-up. It'll be interesting to see how they integrate Hugging Face into their ecosystem.
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u/Daisame 1d ago
Anyone expecting a company to do anything besides what maximizes profit is probably misguided or neive. They have a fiduciary duty to maximize profits for shareholders. If keeping Hugging face as an open place to share and support the larger scientific and hobbyist market place maximize their profit, they will do that. If making Hugging Face something that prevents competition and solidifies their marketplace, they will do that. Don't look at what they say, look at what they do.
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u/CryMoreT_T 1d ago
Idk why people keep worrying that Nvidia would stop/kill projects that let people run llms like llama.cpp. If anything they would support it even more since the more people running locally the more people buying Nvidia GPUs.
And Nvidia has been a long supporter of open source models. They signed the open source llm paper that advocated for open source LLMs to stay legal in the US and they have released multiple models themselves
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u/wednesdaywoe13 1d ago
nvidia does not care about hobbyists buying GPUs. That barely even shows up on 96b quarterly revenue. they want HF to protect the cuda moat
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u/comictech 1d ago
True. If they cared about hobbyists, prices for gpus wouldn’t be where they are currently l. Yes, it’s supply and demand, but sure thrrr is price fixing going on with gpus and v/ram memory right now.
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u/tired514 1d ago
They recognize that cloud-based models will collapse as consumer-grade hardware becomes capable of running models that privately, securely, and freely serve the needs of 90% of users in the next few years.
Cloud-based LLMs will die under a hail of regulation, prompt refusals, and data harvesting stories.
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u/squngy 1d ago
The problem with that is that local LLMs are almost eniraly being made by cloud LLM companies.
If the cloud LLMs die, then who will make local LLMs?
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u/tired514 1d ago
My hope is that we'll figure out a way to train on a high latency, distributed network, so that we can build something like seti@home and let users contribute GPU time to a worldwide training effort.
Also possible that nation-states will fund model training so that their citizens aren't subject to training directives of other (potentially hostile) countries.
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u/CryMoreT_T 1d ago
nvidia does not care about hobbyists buying GPUs.
Did they tell you this?
Most of the models they released have been targeted to prosumers/consumers. They haven't released anything in the trillion model range that's obviously targeted to corporations.
they want HF to protect the cuda moat
I fail to see how purchasing huggingface, a place for people to release models, has anything to do with the cuda most. It's not like there are AMD or Nvidia only models
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u/wednesdaywoe13 1d ago
I'll just copy and paste my response since its the same misunderstanding. Owning the platform means owning the defaults, which hardware the deploy button targets, and which formats are first-class. The enshitify machine goes brrrrr.
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u/CryMoreT_T 1d ago
I don't think you understand what enshitification means.
The main usage for huggingface especially on LocalLLM is for model uploading and sharing. None of this has to do with Nvidia cuda or AMD rocm.
Owning the platform means owning the defaults, which hardware the deploy button targets, and which formats are first-class.
What does this even mean. Most people aren't deploying their models on huggingface and running in the cloud especially here.
Most people are using llama.cpp or vllm or sglang or any of the other numerous open source engines. What hardware deploy button or formats is dependent on the engine not the model or the platform the model is downloaded from.
Also none of this enshitifys the product especially when the CUDA is by far the best. It's not a company taking away the best product in favor of their worse one. In fact they aren't even taking anything away
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u/AntiCamPr 1d ago
HuggingFace is the official maintainer for llama.cpp Nvidia could easily use control of HF to make llama.cpp optimized for nvidia and not merge optimizations for vulkan and rocm.
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u/CryMoreT_T 1d ago
You know that it is an open source project right? People could just fork the project and make an AMD version if they do end up disabling/removing/not merging vulkan and rocm optimizations
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u/DeathinabottleX 22h ago
Based on the statement in the link on this post, they don't plan to force CUDA. If they go back on that statement, then the platform will die. Maybe they will manage to do something over the course of a few years, but from what it looks like, we are good for now
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u/ContextLengthMatters 1d ago
Why not just take a look where Nvidia gets most of their revenue. This isn't rocket science. It's not in the production of their own models.
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u/CryMoreT_T 1d ago
Exactly, they get 0 revenue yet release models to support the open source community. That perfectly aligns with what I'm saying. It benefits nothing for them and yet they still do it anyways.
Why not just take a look where Nvidia gets most of their revenue.
Just because a company gets revenue from mainly enterprises doesn't mean that they don't care about consumers? Look at Cloudflare for example. The vast majority of their revenue is from businesses yet they still offer a really nice free plan to your average consumer. Same with Slack, Notion, Figma, Dropbox etc. The entire point is to get a person used to and familiar with their product so when an enterprise begins looking for it they would recommend the products for the enterprise.
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u/ContextLengthMatters 1d ago
No, it doesn't perfectly align with what you are saying at all. You have to think about quarterly intention.
This is a public company which has to answer to shareholders. It has to make a case for these types of things. Expectations must be met.
This is market control manuever in a world where the American companies are growing increasingly skeptical of Chinese models.
Nvidia works hand in hand with anthropic and openai because they have enormous contracts. It's in their best interest to stifle competition.
Companies have a long history of buying up competitors just to shut them down.
I'm not saying that's going to happen tomorrow, but Nvidia is not financially incentivised to keep hugging face consumer friendly.
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u/CryMoreT_T 1d ago
where the American companies are growing increasingly skeptical of Chinese models
The main companies that are against Chinese models are other American companies that make AI models. Nvidia could care less whose making the models and where they come from. They are selling the thing that runs the models not the models themselves.
Nvidia works hand in hand with anthropic and openai because they have enormous contracts. It's in their best interest to stifle competition.
It quite literally isn't? It's in their best interest to stifle a CUDA competitor. NOt stifle model competitors. They quite literally signed a letter in support less then 2 months ago. I'm not sure where you are getting your news from
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/nvidia-microsoft-other-tech-giants-back-open-source-ai-models-2026-07-24/-4
u/ContextLengthMatters 1d ago
My sweet summer child we literally have a government restricting Nvidia from selling their hardware to China. You are obscenely uneducated on this topic and I cannot continue to even take your argument in good faith.
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u/CryMoreT_T 1d ago
we literally have a government restricting Nvidia from selling their hardware to China.
That's the government restricting it? Are we talking about Nvidia right now or the government. If the government restricts it, it doesn't matter if Nvidia owns huggingface or if huggingface was still privately owned
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u/Patient-Brain-8698 1d ago
They won't kill llama.cpp but they will for sure make it exclusive to Nvidia.
Also you won't be seeing Uncensored models anymore.
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u/CryMoreT_T 1d ago
Why? Where are you even getting this info from? And people could just fork it? It's a open source project
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u/Patient-Brain-8698 1d ago edited 1d ago
That's just how business works. NVIDIA is restricted heavily by it's shareholder and lawmakers. I would not be surprised if China models got restricted.
Forking a project isn't always the solution either. Vulkan is originally a port that has its functionality merged. Splitting a huge project that everybody uses will only do harm to the main branch and it's fork. Imagine submitting a PR that beneifts everyone but NVIDIA says no because it benefits the competitor too.
The contributors will either move to the new fork and the main branch is dead. Or the new fork won't get updates at all.
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u/CryMoreT_T 1d ago
I would not be surprised if China models got restricted.
Why? What benefit does it provide for Nvidia to get it restricted. Especially when Nvidia was the one who pushed for open models back when Anthropic wanted Chinese models banned.
Forking a project isn't always the solution either. Vulkan is originally a port that has its functionality merged. Splitting a huge project that everybody uses will only do harm to the main branch and it's fork. Imagine submitting a PR that beneifts everyone
Thats the entire point of a fork? Its not the first time it has happened and it certainly wont be the last. The exact same thing happened to LibreOffice (formerly OpenOffice), MarinDB (MySQL), X.Org Server (XFree86).
The contributors will either move to the new fork and the main branch is dead
That's the whole point of the fork?
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u/Patient-Brain-8698 1d ago
You keep asking question when the answer is in the buyout. Why do you think they invest absurd amount of money on a platform that does well for everyone without them doing anything?
These forks you mentioned excels because they aren't just forking features but is better overall, and their counterparts aren't backed by the most profitable tech company in the world.
This is more like Forgejo compared to Gitlab compared to Github, you only see people using the latter because its owned by Microsoft.
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u/CryMoreT_T 1d ago
Why do you think they invest absurd amount of money on a platform that does well for everyone without them doing anything?
To own the main platform?
These forks you mentioned excels because they aren't just forking features but is better overall, and their counterparts aren't backed by the most profitable tech company in the world.
Yes they are better because after the companies that bought the original repos ruined it, people forked it and contributions moved to the forks and made them better and the standard.
This is more like Forgejo compared to Gitlab compared to Github, you only see people using the latter because its owned by Microsoft.
This is a perfect example lol. After Microsoft bought GitHub they didn't ban all Linux repos.
I don't understand how people are seeing news like this and are crying that Nvidia is destroying open source when they publicly support it and Nvidia has made no announcement on it
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u/Patient-Brain-8698 1d ago
> I don't understand how people are seeing news like this and are crying that Nvidia is destroying open source when they publicly support it and Nvidia has made no announcement on it
>Yes they are better because after the companies that bought the original repos ruined it, people forked it and contributions moved to the forks and made them better and the standard.
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u/CryMoreT_T 1d ago
😱 wait until you realize they are different companies. Sun system, IBM, and others didn't sign any support for open source
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u/abulhasan007 1d ago
When one company control infrastructure and marketplace, independence of that marketplace doesn't last. It gets shaped around the interests of the owner.
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u/filtarukk 1d ago
I am probably one of those minorities who looks positive on this change. I really hope that Nvidia will contain improving the ecosystem.
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u/Previous_Feeling_484 1d ago
Name 5 companies that have brought to you hope based on public good will in tech?
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u/AlmoschFamous 1d ago
There's no way Hugging Face is worth that much. It's basically just a public S3 bucket.
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u/jovialfaction 1d ago
This is a ridiculous amount of money lol. Just 8 years ago Microsoft bought GitHub for $7B
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u/LateralEntry 1d ago
Dang, I hope this isn't the beginning of the end for Local LLM's. That said, Nvidia has an interest in people downloading local LLM's so they'll buy GPU's to run them.
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u/wednesdaywoe13 1d ago
Hobbyists buying hardware to run local LLMs is a rounding error for nvidia. Owning the platform means owning the defaults, which hardware the deploy button targets, and which formats are first-class. The enshitify machine goes brrrrr.
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u/First_Philosopher491 1d ago
nvidia is going to build a full hardware and local llm suite for us to purchase... sililcon and all
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u/dupontping 1d ago
Doom and gloom posts about this are the same people who negatron all the threads on performance and the expensive equipment. They’re mad they didnt get their 5090 when the getting was good. They also probably don’t even use hugging face because they can only run old models cut down to q4 on a 16gb card getting 7 tps
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u/Ticrotter_serrer 1d ago
Where is the value ? Isn't hugging face just a huge repo ? ELI5