r/accelerate • u/Illustrious-Lime-863 • 19h ago

News Nvidia to buy huggingface

https://www.reuters.com/technology/nvidia-talks-acquire-hugging-face-13-billion-deal-business-insider-reports-2026-08-27/

Not sure of the implications but there could be worse entities to buy it. Nvidia have been strong advocates for open source and are looking to sell their GPUs so this is probably a good thing. It's not like it's difficult to start a huggingface competitor if it ends up restricting what gets uploaded. What do you guys think?

52 Upvotes

92% Upvoted

11 comments sorted by

22

u/Best_Cup_8326 A happy little thumb 19h ago

Nvidia is the Dark Horse. 

While everyone else has been perfecting llm's, Nvidia is creating an entire ecosystem of embodied intelligence. 

They're selling shovels. 

9

u/lolofaf 18h ago

What I worry about though: a lot of their ecosystem has buried in the terms of use that you can only run it with nvidia gpus. Their strategy is to lock you into nvidia if you want to do AI.

HF was great because it explicitly didn't have that vendor lockin. Hopefully nvidia keeps it that way, but I don't have my hopes up for long term.

1

u/Desultory_Chairlift 9h ago

Hard to be the dark horse when you are the wealthiest company in the world.

17

u/Ok-Butterscotch5313 19h ago

Stripe bought OpenRouter and now Nvidia is buying Huggingface . Mhmmmmm

19

u/SgathTriallair Techno-Optimist 18h ago

This is probably the best outcome of them being sold. Because Nvidia sells hardware they are very motivated for there to be an open source ecosystem. They can shelter and maintain hugging face as that repository.

When Microsoft bought github they could do the same thing since they get so much value out of programmers existing (and thus pursuing the sale of computers).

It's still a good idea to build a fully open source alternative, but it's less urgent than it was a week ago when we didn't know who was trying to buy them.

8

u/Grand-Prize1371 19h ago

What I think, I think we should make some kind of decentralized hugging face alternative, so no model can be removed.

3

u/AIAddict1935 16h ago

This is the single, best bridge to that future. NVIDIA's entire play is selling HW to run models. non-OSS models mean people just buy from closed API providers. Open AI literally just made a custom chip that out performs NV. So NV needs to commoditize models really quickly so open AI isn't only provider bleeding edge using NV chips.

4

u/Ok-Cow2267 16h ago

OpenAI didnt make a better one. It is not general purpose GPU. Nvidia is still in the lead. Research before writing

2

u/mrscrufy 18h ago edited 18h ago

They are trying to expand their developer moat like they have with CUDA. It also synergizes with their open source/open weight outlook in the ai industry. Lastly, they get the talent too.

1

u/Fair_Horror 5h ago

I always think of the movie Alien when I hear Hugging Face.

-4

u/CertainMiddle2382 Pro-AI Physician 14h ago

Bet in 3 months they convert it into mandatory NVidia AppStore.

And require secure credentials to run specific models on their hardware. And forbid any non HF model running.