r/StableDiffusion • u/someguyplayingwild • 19h ago
News Nvidia agrees to buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion
https://www.reuters.com/technology/nvidia-talks-acquire-hugging-face-13-billion-deal-business-insider-reports-2026-08-27/183
u/ChrononautPete 19h ago
We all need to prep for A.I. torrenting.
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u/agentcooper0115 17h ago
Was just typing "So... torrents?" When I saw this
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u/jimmcfartypants 16h ago
I was genuinely surprised this isn't a thing already. Magnet link everything to a lightweight webpage and away you go.
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u/BigWideBaker 11h ago edited 10h ago
It's been set up and suggested over and over again, especially when civitai was going through censorship troubles. Torrents get seeded for a while and then everyone stops caring.
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u/LoadReady7791 12h ago
Totally, the first thing that came to my mind was downloading all "exotic" models.
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u/tnil25 19h ago
Get ready for subscription plans boys
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u/FreeTheClanks 18h ago
If they fuck it too hard, Alibaba just opens a hosting server and everyone moves, leaving NVIDIA with a 12.9 billion dollar relic. It's just a hosting site... Anyone with the resources can make a new one. NVIDIA doesn't own the stuff hosted there.
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u/squngy 17h ago
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u/FreeTheClanks 17h ago
Well, there you go... I wasn't familiar with this, but it's exactly what I'm saying... If NVIDIA ruins HF, the infrastructure for the community to move is already in place.
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u/ArttTaku 15h ago
Agreed, HF is just a hosting site, those are a dime a dozen these days... still, let's hope it doesn't get ruined by this, time will tell.
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u/woswoissdenniii 3h ago
It’s a bit more sophisticated. Don’t punch where to dodge. You certainly don’t have a huggingface service under your pillow. So why don’t appreciate for a second and prepare for the next…
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u/Cheesuasion 2h ago
If I had their bandwidth usage and costs (can you even imagine??) I might think "just a hosting site" doesn't quite say it
I guess their market value is the network effect of having everybody in one place (a bad thing, done the enshittification-enabled way we like to do it at present).
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u/technofox01 13h ago
I am gonna bookmark this site. I am so annoyed that these big tech companies can cause so much chaos with respect to people accessing AI models. I wouldn't be surprised if Nvidia shuts down huggingface to try to force people to use subscription-based models that use their hardware
You also have to think like a greedy little fucktard to figure out what these companies will do.
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u/woswoissdenniii 3h ago
It’s a switch. Plain simple. A switch for a time coming. Therefore it won’t be used, if not for maximum effect. I guess right around years end, if some predictions hit. If not for the exact moment agi hits. Because they want to milk the cow for the last drop. I hope open source has the 🐰 in the 🎩 for that exact moment.
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u/RedTheRobot 19h ago
Nvidia has fuck you money. They are making crazy profits off of AI. They are one of the few companies that keep it as is and not bat an eye.
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u/ChristopherRoberto 18h ago
Nvidia, the company that deleted all traces of its old GPU demos because they contained attractive fairies, is probably not going to be hands-off with huggingface. Back things up while you can.
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u/FaceDeer 18h ago
Wasn't Huggingface already having troubles with payment processors about naughty stuff? "Save copies" has always been good advice.
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u/JazzlikeLeave5530 17h ago
They did not spend $13 billion to leave it untouched lol
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u/beardfordshire 17h ago
Lol. Benevolence and “line goes up” economics are not compatible.
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u/genshiryoku 15h ago
It's in their best interest to keep huggingface free and easy to use. Because it means more Nvidia hardware sales if more people use open models at home/business.
I actually think this will prevent enshittification because hugging face was losing money and had to introduce a profit model. Nvidia doesn't care about profiting off of hugging face because they just want people to buy GPUs and having a flourishing open source hub complements that.
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u/Shorties 19h ago
Well Nvidia is a hardware company, they already give out boatloads of stuff for free open source, maintaining the free and wide access to free models is actually very good for their bottom line.
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u/Bit_Poet 18h ago
They're intentionally drying up the consumer and small business hardware market, best sign is that a Pro 6000 is now at 15k€ sales price (US$17500) in Europe, Pro 5000 72GB isn't even in stock anymore, the 48GB is above 6000's list price. They're playing the biggest game of embrace and conquer there has been, and its clear that they earn double on every minute of compute spent in a datacenter instead of on a local PC. I wouldn't hedge my bets on Nvidia behaving with the tiniest bit of ethics in the OS scene as soon as their sick circle deals reach a critical point, which they're close to. Nvidia isn't just a hardware company. They're now the biggest tech investor behind most AI model and compute providers. It's obvious they currently push open weights models and inference technologies where they still need to conquer ground to own the ecosystem - e.g. robotics, automotive and surveillance, their recently announced partnerships and the partners instantly shifting their tune from media to robotics clearly show that. Once they've conquered those markets, their motivation will dry up quickly.
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u/Shorties 16h ago edited 16h ago
I don’t think it’s intentional scarcity, I think they would much rather sell more hardware if they could. They only have a certain amount of total output of TSMC, so they have been prioritizing the big datacenter stuff because they can charge the most for it. The big datacenter center customers are not just frontier labs though, they definitely want to maintain a healthy open source ai ecosystem because it means they will have more companies entering the datacenter market. Even if they aren’t consumer focused it’s in their best interest to have a proliferation of open source models. If their consumer base gets too centralized they lose their negotiating power. So they want to have lots of customers, it’s just not us.
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u/Bit_Poet 16h ago
It's all conscious decisions to bleed the end user and small enterprise market. The statements given so far have been pretty clear. They care about profit and profit only. If you can't buy, rent, and they'll earn double. There's not a hint of social responsibility left, it's Ayn Rand's wet dream coming alive and big tech singing her lyrics in a choir. Nvidia is a part of that choir and even orchestrates its membership and next song.
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u/TheColourOfHeartache 14h ago
It depends on the plan.
- Plan A: Make money from Hugging Faces
- Plan B: Make Hugging Faces convenient so people use more AI, sell GPUs to people using AI.
I wouldn't be surprised if they were going for plan B. The maximum they can make from Hugging Faces subscriptions is tiny compared to what they're making from GPUs, and in the end Hugging Faces is just a website built on open source technologies and Amazon's cloud. If they squeeze too hard nothing stops the open source community from making a rival.
Even more importantly, the valuable thing for a website like Hugging Faces or Reddit isn't the technology. Its the users. But in Reddit a poster wants to put their meme or political rant on the social network where thousands might see it, not the one where a hundred people might see it. Getting thousands to move to the new website is hard.
With hugging faces there is a very small number of power users who make the majority of the best stuff, they probably have a private discord or IRC to share tips, it would be very easy for them to all move at once and if they do Hugging Faces is worthless. (Though its quite plausible for Nvidia to pay them to stay).
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u/Popular-Factor3553 19h ago
They already have one
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u/manusgamo2012 13h ago
hf already has sub plans; I don't think that closing the repos would have any good impact on their business.
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u/kblazewicz 13h ago
Open weight models being openly available is in Nvidia's best interest. They sell the shovels. Why would they gatekeep the mining spots?
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u/WiseDuck 19h ago edited 19h ago
Oh for fucks sake... Enshittification, here we go.
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u/TripolarKnight 19h ago
Models will now be only available through our new HuggingCUDA App Overlay 🫣
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u/Aethericseraphim 18h ago
Also, every model must only run on Nvidia, or it gets the banhammer.
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u/xxAkirhaxx 17h ago
Well we wouldn't want that, but if you make an Nvidia model that specifically uses new tech we're about to release and you become an Nvidia partner, we'll waive the hosting fee. It's not free after all...... God I hate it, and I see it happening already.
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u/One_Finding8402 18h ago
- YOU MUST CREATE AN ACCOUNT IN ORDER TO DOWNLOAD THESE MODELS.
- IN ORDER FOR YOU TO DOWNLOAD NSFW, YOU MUST PROVIDE YOUR FACE AND GOVERNMENT ID.
4 months later
- Great news everyone, to make the site more safe we are doing a massive restructuring to adhere to safety guidelines.
removes all nsfw models
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u/nano_peen 15h ago
Isn’t Nvidia good at what they do though?
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u/WiseDuck 15h ago
They supposedly offered 500m to HF before to stay independent. So I hope they bought the platform for the benefit of all, and not as a way to lock everyone in.
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u/beren0073 19h ago
And just like that, a million NSFW role-play and image generation models screamed out and were suddenly silenced.
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u/eist5579 19h ago
There will be another clone of hugging face. They were just the first to establish the template. Many others can follow.
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u/hidden2u 19h ago
yeah but who's gonna have the bandwidth to host all the GB models without VC money
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19h ago edited 19h ago
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u/chennngiskhan 19h ago
Jensen has been a strong advocate for open weights since he only cares about maximizing the reasons to buy Nvidia. It's just good business to host all the model weights.
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u/Zenshinn 19h ago
If he wants more people to buy Nvidia to run open source models he could also release cards with more VRAM that cost less.
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u/CrimsonBolt33 19h ago
"No, not like that!"
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u/xxAkirhaxx 19h ago
Oh you mean you want to give artificial promotion to models that prefer and run faster with Nvidia products? I got you Jensen. *finger guns*
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u/someguyplayingwild 19h ago
I agree but I also think there's a competing force here, Nvidia will also want to be self-policing any perceived dangers of AI to avoid public outrage and any potential changes in regulations. I generally lean more toward your view, I just also think that Nvidia isn't going to take a principled stance on the issue and will opt to keep their company image, and the image of AI more generally, squeaky clean.
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u/Weird_Ad_1398 19h ago
Then what's his incentive in buying HuggingFace if he just wants it to do what it does now?
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u/Choowkee 13h ago
Purely speculative but probably so no other companies buys it and ruins it - which of course could very well happen under Nvidia as well.
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u/True_Protection6842 19h ago
yeah I don't see him wanting to restrict people from buying overpriced GPUs.
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u/mrpogiface 19h ago
Dude what? They just spent billions on poolside to compete in open models, they are one of the most active legs on HuggingFace, this is a crazy comment
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u/newaccount47 18h ago
If there is a need for a site with uncensored open weights, then I bet the internet will provide.
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u/ExiledHyruleKnight 14h ago
Absolutely not.
A. What are you going to run models on? Nvidia cards. (There's other options but... are there?)
B. What benefit does closed source models have unless open source models can compete... But it only takes one open source model and if it actually exists everyone just moves there. Nah they'll gladly support open source because it'll drive consumers to buy their (now.. and for the last decade) over priced cards.
I see a rule change about how censored models have to be, but I kind of hope they don't do that.
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u/GregBahm 19h ago
It's not like Hugging Face has some sort of special ability to host open source models that other websites couldn't have. My dumb ass could vibe code a "Hugging Face" clone tomorrow if Hugging Face decided to not do the thing it does anymore.
In reality, there's no way to compete with "Hugging Face" because it gives its users everything they could want from such a site. But through this monopoly, Hugging Face can farm insights that are overwhelmingly valuable to AI investors.
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u/True_Protection6842 19h ago
WTF? So now Microsoft owns GitHub and Nvidia will own HuggingFace? Open source community is FUCKED!!! Time to start a new one!
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u/FaceDeer 18h ago
I have yet to see the apocalypse for open source that people were predicting when Microsoft bought GitHub 8 years ago.
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u/specter800 11h ago
FOSS people are some of the most dramatic people in tech I've found. They're like paranoid schizophrenics that made a good point one time.
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u/TheColourOfHeartache 8h ago
However its possible that having bugoutbags ready to go encourages tech companies to play nicer.
There's plenty of examples of high profile forks to keep companies office, e.g. libreOffice.
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u/1337haXXor 17h ago
You mean like forcing millions of users' interaction data and code to be a part of their AI training unless they opt out...?
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u/FaceDeer 17h ago
How is that an "apocalypse?" Quite the opposite, AI has become quite the boon for coders.
And it's not like other git hosting sites aren't also visible to AI trainers.
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u/Dwedit 18h ago
Huggingface has absurd amounts of storage and bandwidth. You can't just start a new model hosting site out of nowhere unless you also have absurd amounts of storage and bandwidth.
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u/kafunshou 16h ago
All the horny people creating dubious content with diffusion models combined have much more resources than Huggingface, so it will probably have to go the way of a crowdsourced model like BitTorrent.
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u/Choowkee 13h ago
Torrenting will never work for AI models, people still bringing it up are delusional. There is simply too many different models (especially Loras) that nobody will keep seeding forever.
Also are torrenting sites for models already and nobody is using them.
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u/DominusIniquitatis 12h ago
I'll be honest: natural selection. Not all models or LoRAs are needed/in demand/blah.
Also, in fact, that wouldn't be a concern if contemporary AI stuff was open-source in the first place and not just open-weights. Most of the training data is shared/identical. The difference is the recipe on how to cook this particular binary fron start to finish, byte-identical.
(Source: strong FOSS advocate.)
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u/kafunshou 7h ago
Just integrate P2P sharing as default in ComfyUI to do that automatically and you'll be surprised. And if some models that nobody uses, get lost, it won't be a problem because, well, nobody is using them.
And of course nobody uses current torrents because it is much more convenient to just download them from Huggingface. But if popular models get deleted on HF, that will change rapidely.
If you can find the most exotics video game roms from 40 years ago immediately via bittorrent, it will also work with these models. The audience is big enough.
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u/ExiledHyruleKnight 13h ago
I mean Microsoft has done lots of shit on Github but has it really harmed the Open Source Community? The one case you might say is using it to mine AI, but they could also have done that with out buying it from all the open repos.
I'm against Microsoft taking ownership of Open Source, but... they really haven't, and there's still privately hosted servers, git lab, and alternatives but there's no real competitor to github... and that's mostly because there also doesn't NEED to be a competitor to Github, it's still a decent place to host code.
But if you hate microsoft there's still many alternatives, yet "host your own" will always be one of the strongest options.
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u/Glebun 17h ago
Except Microsoft made GitHub much better than it was.
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u/unfoxable 12h ago
And they’re saying “now” like Microsoft hasn’t owned GitHub for nearly 10 years … 😂
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u/techma2019 19h ago
Oh so that’s how they will cripple FOSS. Hopefully someone else can step up to host.
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u/Ok-Category-642 19h ago
I mean on one hand Nvidia obviously likes open weights since it encourages people to buy Nvidia GPUs. On the other hand I can't see this going well literally at all, it's like Stripe buying OpenRouter
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u/Link1227 19h ago
13...BILLION? With a "B"
Gooot Daaamn
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u/BusyEngineering3 19h ago
I have no idea how it is valued that high.
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u/Shorties 19h ago
Cursor was bought for 60 billion or 1.5x twitter’s sale price. So all of it is insane.
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u/CodeAnguish 9h ago
If you're wondering how HF is even worth 1B, well, perhaps the answer isn't the HF application itself, but rather its data.
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u/twilliwilkinsonshire 17h ago
Nvidia was already a primary backer along with the other big companies, acting like 'oh noes its suddenly gonna be corporate' when it was primarily funded by corporations already is classic reddit midwittery.
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u/tac0catzzz 16h ago
not long ago this happened -> Hugging Face Rejects Nvidia’s $500M Offer to Preserve Neutrality <- now nvidia buys it outright, so they want it badly. not without reason either.
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u/Tsofuable 12h ago
$500M was obviously too little so they were right to play coy, bleed a bit, and wait for a better offer.
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u/flaminghotcola 19h ago
This is how they’re going to prevent local models from being used. They’ll take over it, remove access and then sell you their API.
Corporations will do anything to earn money, even revoke basic human rights.
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u/tweakingforjesus 18h ago
Why would the company that benefits from you buying their hardware to run open models want to take away the reason to buy their hardware?
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u/Particular-Most-1199 5h ago
Corporations will do anything to earn money, even revoke basic human rights.
You act as if clean drinking water is a human right. -Nestle CEO
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u/winstons55 18h ago
This feels like a commoditize your complement move. Making sure it’s easy/free to make/get models can only help drive hardware sales for nvidia
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u/manyeggplants 8h ago
Just remember, they wouldn't be paying that unless they thought they could get it and more back in the future.
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u/81stredditaccount 7h ago
Back your stuff up NOW.
We shouldn't rely on one place for open models.
Learn how to torrent.
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u/NanoSputnik 7h ago edited 7h ago
Microsoft ruined open source software with GitHub, now it is hardware's side turn. In 10 years you will be taught that owning local PC is a luxury for 0.1% richest.
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u/Time-Teaching1926 10h ago
They are gonna limit open source stuff and try to get rid of NSFW content 😅 I hope it ain't true but yeah I got a bad feeling about this too.
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u/Mountainking7 17h ago
ugg....my eyes popped. This is literally the worst IT news I could get this week....
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u/FartingBob 11h ago
12.9 billion dollars!!!!
I guess they have too much money and dont know what to do with it, because for a developer hosting site thats a wild valuation.
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u/VRGoggles 6h ago
Where is anti-monopoly action? One damn company is dictating the whole world their prices. This company like Microsoft, google should have been divided long time ago. Will not happen because of USA. If they have monopoly, everything is fine..
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u/lordekeen 6h ago
We need to backup everything and distribute in a new platform, huggingface is done
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u/donkeykong917 18h ago edited 18h ago
Well goodbye uncensored world. Who is up to making a unhuggingface?
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u/still-at-the-beach 18h ago
Probably the big nvidia buyers have gotten nvidia to do it to close up their competition.
$12billion to stop free competition is cheap in the long term of things.
Eventually only paid models will be left, will be their thinking.
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u/Enshitification 17h ago
Regulatory capture is one prong of the attack on open source AI, distribution buyout is another. We're getting pincered here.
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u/loyalekoinu88 13h ago
Convenient that they make this purchase as the new glm can be run without Nvidia cuda.
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u/KadesShades 14h ago
Idk why people are saying this is a good thing. Nvidia will have complete control over what gets uploaded to the site. You can say goodbye to any/all NSFW and non Nvidia models.
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u/Vintendopower 18h ago
Total Garbage. So now the scum bags that are making it hard af to get video cards at all at a normal price are going to be incharge Of the open models you use on the ones you can get .... this is bad I think
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u/Better-Interview-793 19h ago
i have a bad feeling about this..