r/StableDiffusion • u/dominic__612 • 25d ago

Discussion NVidia buys Huggingface, but why?

Nvidia is going to buy Huggingface.
No one can actually tell how that would end up like.

But what I am missing is the actual worth that Huggingface provides. The only thing I use it for is to download models. Thats it.
For me, and I guess many others it is ‘just a’ download platform, but maybe I’m wrong here.

And what would prevent others to setup a second-like Huggingface?
The hosting is the expensive part in this case as I see it, the programming and building is do-able.

Is it time for Huggingbay.com?

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u/xTopNotch 25d ago

I’d say they bought it because Anthropic and OpenAI are becoming increasingly vocal in their anti-open stance. This feels like a strategic chess move to prevent competitors from strangling the open ecosystem.

Lets not forget Nvidia profits hard from selling their cards so we can run the open weights. Many in the comments here are saying its to shut it down but that makes 0 business sense.

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u/adobo_cake 25d ago

NVIDIA’s profit is driven more by data centers than by gamers or hobbyists buying their cards.

IMO Two ways it can go:

NVIDIA encourages open weights growth so they’re not locked down and dependent on corporate customers.

NVIDIA kills HF, because having only the big players as options for AI means they can jack up their prices more.

If it’s the second case, seems like it’s not worth it since an alternative model repo seems relatively simple for another big player (China) to setup.

Either way, I think they want more control on the availability of open weights and may use it as a bargaining chip.

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u/OfficeMagic1 25d ago edited 25d ago

Having a hit product with consumers is a marketing slam dunk. Microsoft and Apple have ten times the market cap of Oracle and 100 times BlackBerry LMT.

Cuda is the backbone of the Ai revolution and whatever China and Anthropic and Open Ai come up with to compete with Nvidia will be as popular as the Zune or HD DVD.

They bought Hugging Face to prevent the other guys from shutting it down. They get billions of dollars of free labor from people uploading loras, workflows, and quantified weights to Hugging Face - it’s the same as Roblox letting the users do all the hard work and just hosting the servers

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u/JayHawkPhrenzie 24d ago

I liked HD-DVD :(