Nvidia's been pretty terrible for open source / free software. No need to quote Linus Torvalds here. They want to control what runs on their hardware. They want to you write code against their proprietary drivers and APIs, not directly against the hardware (which these days of course also contains plenty of software, but still).
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.
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.
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.
"That's not how citations work." (Dude on the interwebz, 2026)
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.
They’re buying a brand, some employees, and some momentum — not any of their software. HF probably does have propriety goodies to make it all run efficiently, but certainly not a billion dollars worth, much less 13!
We are so used to these numbers being thrown around in the AI era that something one needs a reminder that this is 13 billion, not million. Insane exit by HF.
We can stop with these weak excuses since AMD and Intel have done more for open source than Nvidia has, including their GPU drivers for Linux.
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.
Potentially horrible for monopoly reasons, but if other big acquisitions in the AI era teach us anything, developers are about to get a whole lot of free and discounted trial credits.
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.
Now that you mention sleeping. I imagine one could do cool sleeping startups that clone something but exist only on paper. The sleeper startup is only launched the moment some ham fisted mega corp aquires the original and all the customers are looking for a way to abandon ship.
I think failing to take advantage of the charisma of both Lina Khan and Janet Yellen, and not making them public-facing economics gurus like Alan Greenspan or Larry Summers historically were, was a huge tactical mistake by Biden.
Yellen was objectively the dumbest Treasury Secretary ever. When everyone and their dog realized inflation was getting out of control, she thought it was transitory. She literally gets an F- as an economist.
And some former Roomba employees may have thoughts about Kahn.
Kahn was right about Roomba. Amazon was going to torpedo all the superior competition on the Amazon platform where almost all robot vacuums are sold in the US, plus as the e-commerce monopoly, Amazon was going to instantly have access to an army of cameras inside people’s homes to analyze personal information related to purchase preferences.
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.
This is a tangent to my first comment parent to this one, but also more related to the actual article at hand: whether it's Amazon buying Roomba or Nvidia buying Hugging Face, I have a somewhat radical (or is it?) opinion that large companies like Nvidia, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Coca-Cola, etc, should not actually be allowed to acquire companies. At all. under any circumstances, even if competition is healthy.
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.
Roomba was not competitive in the market, no amount of Amazon market manipulation would have changed that. Best case scenario, Amazon would have invested in making it competitive. Worst case, their engineers would have been absorbed into Amazon's warehouse robotics projects.
Is either of those worse than what actually happened: the company is now a zombie brand for a Chinese company?
Of course Amazon would have changed that. You would go on Amazon and search for "robot vacuum" and Amazon would put iRobot at the top of the results.
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 personally 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.
Yes, that's a very good company to be the owner of iRobot, because they are just a robot factory and not a near-monopoly e-commerce retailer.
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.
True, but better nvidia than any other big tech contender. Nvidia has a very strong business incentive to make huggingface thrive, whereas pretty much everyone else has the opposite incentive.
I think this is good.. They have incentives to keep things free to keep people using their GPUs. I think that's one of the least enshittifying outcomes possible
The $13b doesn't go to hugging face's bank acct to pay for anything like S3 egress fees... It go to hugging face's owners' Bank accounts for them to do anything else. New cohorts of billionaires and centi millionaires getting minted.
I'm sure it'll be fine. As long as you have the latest 90-class card you'll probably continue have nearly full functionality from the HF libraries. (Upgrade to enterprise gear for full functionality)
The fit is theoretically good (nvidia is model agnostic) but I can see then pushing the ecosystem increasingly towards cuda and some custom nvidia software packages for inference etc etc
The unlimited private repos for free tier would have happened anyways. You have to remember that this was around the time people were jumping ship from GitHub exactly because they didn't offer private repos for free. It was something many wanted, and they were actively seeking out other places that would give it to them.
Obviously, NVIDIA is trying to own the AI development chain.
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.
The more interesting is HF turned down a $500M Nvidia investment late last year at
a $7B valuation, after passing on a $235M round in 2023 at $4.5B —
going from "we don't want a dominant investor" to a $13B full
acquisition in under a year is quite the reversal.
I don't think they passed on the 4.5 billion. They still raised it in 2023 with investors like Alphabet etc. They turned Nvidia *earlier this year* for the $7 billion valuation deal. It makes sense if they were angling for an acquisition.
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 :)".
HF is the default platform to find models. Not just ones published by big labs but also a lot of the distilled or fine-tuned versions, etc.
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.
They have various paid services that relate to AI—paid inference hosting; paid accounts aimed at AI development with GPU rentals [credits plus paid overages, I believe], more private storage and public storage than free accounts; and many of the community a and some other benefits on individual/team/enterprise tiers; additional paid storage above the base quotas for the paid account tiers; on demand rentals of HF managed containers on GCP and AWS, and some other things.
I’m asking more to work out what is the basis of this valuation. Why would Nvidia spend $13B for what seems to be a services that gives things away for free.
I dunno. You can argue over whether they're overpaying, but it's not like Huggingface is Clinkle. They hit $150 million in ARR this year, they have tons of runway, and according to reports, have just started to even burn the money they raised a few years ago.
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.
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.
Yeah, great point. Nvidia could potentially be overpaying. Not sure how that equates to Huggingface being "a file download mirror with a couple of side features dangling off".
I guess we may have to start paying to download models.
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.
NVidia has been expending energy helping improve local models and inference platforms for them targeting NVidia GPUs; good free models that users can run locally rewards Nvidia’s investment in product lines for local inference (DGX, RTX PCs, etc), as well as—given their continued dominance in the space—the premium over competitors of their consumer and workstation GPUs.
Maybe they're trying to see how big the market actually is before considering shutting it down, maybe or getting lawyers and politicians to try and outlaw or restrict open models if they see a big enough opportunity.
The open weights AI ecosystem is way too concentrated with HF. That said, it was clear they were going to either get bought or aggressively monetized at some point, Nvidia seems like it could be one of the more aligned acquirers.
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.
It's already part of Alibaba, which has its own incentives. So does kaggle with Google. Civitai is neutral but it is mostly nsfw even though they don't show it outright. Torrenting is the Best way
This is the world we live in now. 3-4 megacorps owning everything in every major product category - eyewear, cosmetic, consumer goods, media, tech; you name it.
We need small companies worldwide, developing the things huggingface does. The us china and Europe dominate while the rest of the world sits by idly. Torrent and seed ai models. It's not piracy
Vertically integrated monopolies naturally have aligned in incentives for themselves, which allows more capture which turns out bad for customers. Whether it is a monopoly is an open question.
I remember when people realized gaming cards could be used for general compute (GPGPU) on certain types of parallel numeric work. It was a very cool thing for many types of hackers and science and engineering students and NVIDIA went far out of their way to ensure we could never buy it.
The optimal market strategy there (as in a lot of places) wasn't "sell as much as you can". There's often a superior strategy, when (as with HPC) you have minority industry customers who are very rich and have low price sensitivity. It's to raise the price to what those special customers are willing to pay, and to drop everyone else.
What NVIDIA did was to rip out FP64 capability, systematically, from all of their consumer cards. They firewalled off "useful for GPGPU" as a differentiating feature, segmented the market, and astronomically raised the price of what (if you were looking soley at cost-to-manufacture) could have been easily affordable to any ramen student.
(It's a more obscure version of the Intel-made-ECC-memory-disappear story).
Yes, this is ironic - it was the tinkerers using CUDA on cheap graphics cards that made Nvidia stuff useful in constrained academic environments.
True about Intel and ECC, but AMD now does similar things, even with their consumer CPUs and chipsets.
These three companies now make very sure that consumer products can never canibalize those juicy data center profits - so they make sure to limit what the consumer segment can do.
Same reason why GitHub was acquired for $7.5B at $250 million ARR which is 30x revenues:
VCs could not see any other reason to raise more money and Huggingface was not growing as fast as they thought to justify the valuation or the next fundraise.
So they might as well get Nvidia to save them from the VCs pressurizing them.
That doesn't make much sense to me. Companies don't just buy companies for absurd multiples out of the niceness of their heart.
In the case of GitHub, it was likely for data reasons + wanting to own where developers do work (VScode + Github).
In the case of HuggingFace, honestly not sure as I'm not familiar enough with their business. But I can assure you that Nvidia didn't buy them for 13 billion cause HuggingFace were desperate. When you're desperate, you sell for less not more.
Nvidia is indeed a terrible company when it comes to open source, etc. however, as someone who has been gaming on desktop hardware since the 6xxx card days, Nvidia hardware has always worked. I switched to Linux full time since the 2XX days (maybe it was the 280 gtx?) and never had a lot of the problems everyone else got on Linux (using only the closed source drivers).
Likewise, their hardware has been rock solid and very performant for me. I bought most of my current setup second hand and they've been going strong for years now.
I think they will be, Nvidia has released open source model that also included the data it was trained on. I think they are the only ones that have done that.
They were already pretty vocal about it, but this makes Nvidia pretty much the de facto face of open weight models.
As battle lines get drawn over duopoly vs. open weight it’ll be interesting to see what Nvidia does. They definitely want a piece of more of the stack especially as Huawei chips become more and more of an alternative to cuda.
I'm puzzled by the reactions. This is not a good thing. Yes, they're releasing more open source code and models, but they do it BECAUSE OF pressure from the community and other open source projects.
But Nvidia is a terrible open source and consumer company. They gatekeep a lot and oftentimes it's only open source in name. Outside contributions are often slow-walked or rejected if they don't align with business incentives , and leadership is retained 100% in a couple of people from a certain country.
Linus isn't wrong but at the same time NV has shipped more compute than AMD and Intel combined to consumers. The kind of performance I get out of a modest outlay never ceases to amaze me.
NV is a very different beast from all of those. I have yet to regret buying any of their products and I wouldn't touch your list with a stolen 10' pole.
Isn't it super easy for the community to just replace HuggingFace? Isn't it pretty much just a repo/index for open-weight models? Why is it even worth anything?
> Isn't it pretty much just a repo/index for open-weight models?
No, its not just a repo/index (they also have training, inference hosting, and they develop/maintain a bunch of core AI infrastructure software), and even if it was just a repo/index, replacing a bug centralized repo/index that used by an large community isn’t trivial.
Not if they can't indefinitely contain ram and SSD procurement. And they can't and the Market already showed with specex that they are unwilling to float these fly by night outrageous 'investments' onto institutional holders.
Institutional holders mass revolted at spacex getting into the basket.
AI costs more than having people do the work. Q2 CFO reaction proved that.
Nvidia has already a good free offer with Nim and a lot of compute power available. Plus, they obviously have interest in spreading open models culture.
HuggingFace offers abliterated/uncensored models, which would seem to run contrary to the "AI is too powerful for regular people" narrative that the big players are pushing.
My primary concern is that Nvidia will bow to the pressure and restrict abliterated/uncensored models on HF.
I really wish I'd done better bookmarking back when Nvidia was talking about acquiring ARM. There were all kinds of things coming out saying, if we do this, even though we will be taking over ARM, it will transform us from the inside out. We would become a new different company, that cares about something beyond our own self interest, our own chips.
This feels like a similar leap of faith. One that is hard to believe in. Thankfully, I think Nvidia can keep the lights on here & keep this going. I don't think they have to do much, per se. But it felt implausible then to image an Nvidia that gave a shit about anyone else, an Nvidia that actually gave a flying fuck about drivers or upstream Linux or ecosystems that weren't entirely within their own control.
Similarly the upper quartile of succes here feels mostly like benevolent neglect. I think we can hope for Nvidia to just not mess up a good thing, for them to understand that this open model open ai universe hinges upon Hugging Face, and for them to pretty please keep caring about the existential risk of the hyper-ai'ers all building their own properietary models on proprietary hardware and leaving Nvidia behind some day, and HF being the hedge against being left behind.
The story is in an intermediate state right now, but as semiquaver points out, The Information is reporting it as fact. Since their reporting tends to be as reliable as it is hardwalled, we went with their claim in the title.
Please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.
No doubt you have the nucleus of a substantive comment here, but that's not enough. If you only post the shallowest top stratum of what you're thinking, other people do the same, and then we get "Laws are for poor people" and endless descending repetition. The whole point of this site is to try for something other than that.
I thin HF holds huge power in how they’ve consolidated all the open models and data, but monopoly feels like a stretch here. They are in reality a fairly small startup with lots of alternatives (all of which are much worse at this point granted) and are mostly a loss leading part of the open source ecosystem. I think it would be very hard to make a case against this on monopoly grounds, though I wouldn’t be opposed to someone trying if they thought it was possible.
Nvidia's been pretty terrible for open source / free software. No need to quote Linus Torvalds here. They want to control what runs on their hardware. They want to you write code against their proprietary drivers and APIs, not directly against the hardware (which these days of course also contains plenty of software, but still).
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.
NVIDIA is one of the most open labs.
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.
> NVIDIA is one of the most open labs.
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.
nothing stopping you from doing that
NVIDIA is a lot more than a “lab”.
lol “Everything you said is correct but you’re wrong because I’m thinking about something other than what you were talking about”
>No need to quote Linus Torvalds here
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...
I think it's a plausible play that keeps the AI boom in session for a year or two longer.
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.
Did you just quote an LLM as a citation? That's not how citations work.
"That's not how citations work." (Dude on the interwebz, 2026)
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.
Even worse is that Gemini's knowledge cutoff is still Jan '25.
2026 equivalent of “my Mama told me”
They’re buying a brand, some employees, and some momentum — not any of their software. HF probably does have propriety goodies to make it all run efficiently, but certainly not a billion dollars worth, much less 13!
We are so used to these numbers being thrown around in the AI era that something one needs a reminder that this is 13 billion, not million. Insane exit by HF.
Yeah, the price is weird as fuck.
Nvidia has hardly open sourced the nvcc compiler, yet no-one here is complaining about why it is closed source.
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.
I assume it's because nvidia is a hardware company that produces world class hardware, and it's a compiler to target that.
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.
We can stop with these weak excuses since AMD and Intel have done more for open source than Nvidia has, including their GPU drivers for Linux.
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.
> no-one cares anymore.
possibly because it took qualcomm buying them to make that happen.
Potentially horrible for monopoly reasons, but if other big acquisitions in the AI era teach us anything, developers are about to get a whole lot of free and discounted trial credits.
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.
Yes. Great for devs, for a while. Awful for overall competition and industry's health.
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).
> I think the federal antitrust regulators are asleep.
Have been for a long time. All of the big techs should have been broken up long ago.
You can torrent and seed these models via torrenting. They are not piracy so there's no problem hosting them besides maybe not having enough bandwidth
Except for during Biden, they've been asleep for almost 50 years.
Now that you mention sleeping. I imagine one could do cool sleeping startups that clone something but exist only on paper. The sleeper startup is only launched the moment some ham fisted mega corp aquires the original and all the customers are looking for a way to abandon ship.
Lina Khan @ the FTC was the best thing about the Biden administration, for me.
I think failing to take advantage of the charisma of both Lina Khan and Janet Yellen, and not making them public-facing economics gurus like Alan Greenspan or Larry Summers historically were, was a huge tactical mistake by Biden.
Yellen was objectively the dumbest Treasury Secretary ever. When everyone and their dog realized inflation was getting out of control, she thought it was transitory. She literally gets an F- as an economist.
And some former Roomba employees may have thoughts about Kahn.
Kahn was right about Roomba. Amazon was going to torpedo all the superior competition on the Amazon platform where almost all robot vacuums are sold in the US, plus as the e-commerce monopoly, Amazon was going to instantly have access to an army of cameras inside people’s homes to analyze personal information related to purchase preferences.
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.
This is a tangent to my first comment parent to this one, but also more related to the actual article at hand: whether it's Amazon buying Roomba or Nvidia buying Hugging Face, I have a somewhat radical (or is it?) opinion that large companies like Nvidia, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Coca-Cola, etc, should not actually be allowed to acquire companies. At all. under any circumstances, even if competition is healthy.
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.
Roomba was not competitive in the market, no amount of Amazon market manipulation would have changed that. Best case scenario, Amazon would have invested in making it competitive. Worst case, their engineers would have been absorbed into Amazon's warehouse robotics projects.
Is either of those worse than what actually happened: the company is now a zombie brand for a Chinese company?
Of course Amazon would have changed that. You would go on Amazon and search for "robot vacuum" and Amazon would put iRobot at the top of the results.
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 personally 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.
iRobot is now 100% owned by Shenzhen Picea Robotics of China. (https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1159167/000115916726...)
Yes, that's a very good company to be the owner of iRobot, because they are just a robot factory and not a near-monopoly e-commerce retailer.
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.
The company's name was iRobot, not Roomba.
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.
I miss the Biden administration
I miss every administration back to Roosevelt.
Large numbers of people outside of the United States probably do.
I miss him from inside the United States too.
China and Russia are loving things right now.
That's a sad thing to have to say, but yeah.
True, but better nvidia than any other big tech contender. Nvidia has a very strong business incentive to make huggingface thrive, whereas pretty much everyone else has the opposite incentive.
Especially when all major labs are building their custom inference chips.
> 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.
The era of VC-funded home-delivery recipe boxes is still my favourite.
Yeah this is the "early netflix" era. Take advantage while you can and plan for the future.
Counter point is China can afford to keep pumping out free models for long enough to crash the AI industry, As well as spin up memory production.
Its likely in the near future we will be able to buy 128gb mac minis and run local AI for free.
If we survive, that is.
That means we will torrent these ai models. They are not pirated so there's no problem doing so
I think this is good.. They have incentives to keep things free to keep people using their GPUs. I think that's one of the least enshittifying outcomes possible
Well congrats to Clem and the team. I remember when huggingface was doing things like coreference resolution models on spacy.
I hope nvidia does right by the community.
Edit to add: $13B should cover the S3 egress fees for a couple months :D
They need to switch to egrees free cloudflare R2!
The $13b doesn't go to hugging face's bank acct to pay for anything like S3 egress fees... It go to hugging face's owners' Bank accounts for them to do anything else. New cohorts of billionaires and centi millionaires getting minted.
NVIDIA had more open-source models on huggingface than any other company. A lot better them than any other frontier lab, tbh.
Remember just 6 months ago that "Ggml.ai joins Hugging Face to ensure the long-term progress of Local AI" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47088037)
(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...
Nvidia is promoting "unmetered intelligence". Jensen wants everyone to have a spark dgx with an nvidia chip in their home.
NVidia has reasonable incentives to keep things open indefinitely, it wants people to use it's GPUs
Issue is that llama.cpp is the best way to run models on hardware that isn't nvidias.
Except when they have less than 16 gb of ram?
I have never seen an acquisition be good for the users. I struggle to believe this one will be different
I'm sure it'll be fine. As long as you have the latest 90-class card you'll probably continue have nearly full functionality from the HF libraries. (Upgrade to enterprise gear for full functionality)
Apple buying Workflow (became Shortcuts). Its users have a better, faster tool and got it soon after acquisition. And it has many more users now.
The fit is theoretically good (nvidia is model agnostic) but I can see then pushing the ecosystem increasingly towards cuda and some custom nvidia software packages for inference etc etc
Yeah I'm afraid they will only keep cuda support for their software. Good thing it's all Open source
Truer words were never spoken. This is painfully true.
Acquisition of GitHub let to increased downtimes, but also to unlimited private repos for the free tier.
The unlimited private repos for free tier would have happened anyways. You have to remember that this was around the time people were jumping ship from GitHub exactly because they didn't offer private repos for free. It was something many wanted, and they were actively seeking out other places that would give it to them.
... Which gitlab already had before github. And still does.
Obviously, NVIDIA is trying to own the AI development chain.
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.
The more interesting is HF turned down a $500M Nvidia investment late last year at a $7B valuation, after passing on a $235M round in 2023 at $4.5B — going from "we don't want a dominant investor" to a $13B full acquisition in under a year is quite the reversal.
Well, if they didn't want a dominant investor, they didn't get one, they got acquired.
I don't think they passed on the 4.5 billion. They still raised it in 2023 with investors like Alphabet etc. They turned Nvidia *earlier this year* for the $7 billion valuation deal. It makes sense if they were angling for an acquisition.
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...
Seems the opposite of a reversal to me.
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 :)".
Sounds like it was just too much money for the stakeholders to refuse
Yea, my bet is that there is quite a long list of money bags sitting behind the leadership team that will weigh in if the offer is juicy enough.
HF is the default platform to find models. Not just ones published by big labs but also a lot of the distilled or fine-tuned versions, etc.
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.
If HF didn’t exist, model releases would likely have been on torrents like Linux iso’s back in the day.
> what are some alternatives
good old torrents
What is the business model of hugging face? My understanding was they were basically just a file hosting platform.
They have various paid services that relate to AI—paid inference hosting; paid accounts aimed at AI development with GPU rentals [credits plus paid overages, I believe], more private storage and public storage than free accounts; and many of the community a and some other benefits on individual/team/enterprise tiers; additional paid storage above the base quotas for the paid account tiers; on demand rentals of HF managed containers on GCP and AWS, and some other things.
Didn’t we just witness it? Become a critical ecosystem player then get acquired based on the value of that position.
Possibly, but they were profitable already.
I’m asking more to work out what is the basis of this valuation. Why would Nvidia spend $13B for what seems to be a services that gives things away for free.
Talking about profit is so passé in the new economic paradigm. The rules have changed— it’s about how much a company is worth. Get with the times.
–Some guys in every bubble I’ve witnessed.
I think Russ Hanneman calls it a "pure play" type of company. He put radio on the internet, so he would know.
I dunno. You can argue over whether they're overpaying, but it's not like Huggingface is Clinkle. They hit $150 million in ARR this year, they have tons of runway, and according to reports, have just started to even burn the money they raised a few years ago.
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.
This gets mentioned a lot, but the most valuable companies, by orders of magnitude, have the most profit, by orders of magnitude.
Risk management.
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.
> Why would Nvidia spend $13B for what seems to be a services that gives things away for free.
To stop that! Literally. To stop those services being free.
Why would Nvidia destroy the first place we all look for models to load on our Nvidia hardware?
for 6 months?
They make it easy to run models. The models have to run on hardware somewhere.
This is like saying GitHub or Google just gives away everything for free
Not really. GitHub has a strong platform of paying customers and a solid product that’s hard to replicate.
Google is obvious.
Hugging Face is a file download mirror with a couple of side features dangling off.
Whether you realize it or not Hugging Face's monetization is just as obvious as GitHub's
They hit 150 million in annual recurring revenue this year.
Pretty nice dangling side features apparently.
That still leaves the company valued at 86 years of revenue
Yeah, great point. Nvidia could potentially be overpaying. Not sure how that equates to Huggingface being "a file download mirror with a couple of side features dangling off".
https://huggingface.co/pricing
Isn't this pretty much the model for any tech company? Rush to get MVP released, stoke the hype, cash in on FOMO.
If GLM-5.3 was truly trained and ran on Chinese chips, we'll have to ask what the business model of Nvidia itself is soon :)
I guess we may have to start paying to download models.
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.
I see the opposite — NVIDIA is aiming to commoditize the model layer and push open models that are tuned to run on NVIDIA hardware.
NVidia has been expending energy helping improve local models and inference platforms for them targeting NVidia GPUs; good free models that users can run locally rewards Nvidia’s investment in product lines for local inference (DGX, RTX PCs, etc), as well as—given their continued dominance in the space—the premium over competitors of their consumer and workstation GPUs.
Maybe everyone will migrate to Hugging Bay for downloading models via torrent?
File hosting isn’t that hard to replicate though. Even if they start charging people will just set up torrents for the files or lists of mirrors.
Unless I’m missing something, this feels like Nvidia having more money than they know what to do with.
Maybe they're trying to see how big the market actually is before considering shutting it down, maybe or getting lawyers and politicians to try and outlaw or restrict open models if they see a big enough opportunity.
it's literally the GitHub for AI
ondemand cloud? b2b?
The open weights AI ecosystem is way too concentrated with HF. That said, it was clear they were going to either get bought or aggressively monetized at some point, Nvidia seems like it could be one of the more aligned acquirers.
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.
There are always torrents, which would seem to be a fine way to distribute models.
We also have modelscope.cn, I'm sure that one won't get acquired
It's already part of Alibaba, which has its own incentives. So does kaggle with Google. Civitai is neutral but it is mostly nsfw even though they don't show it outright. Torrenting is the Best way
Monumental implications on OS models. Proper investment in US OS incoming? HF has the best possible distribution to that audience
stripe buys openrouter. nvidia buys hugging face. everyone on the hunt for the app that will function as hub/broker/search/marketplace for models.
This is the world we live in now. 3-4 megacorps owning everything in every major product category - eyewear, cosmetic, consumer goods, media, tech; you name it.
We need small companies worldwide, developing the things huggingface does. The us china and Europe dominate while the rest of the world sits by idly. Torrent and seed ai models. It's not piracy
Brilliant replacement of http://build.nvidia.com to increase developer reach and deployment of nvidia open models!
The companies have aligned incentives so I don't think this is a terrible acquisition for customers.
Vertically integrated monopolies naturally have aligned in incentives for themselves, which allows more capture which turns out bad for customers. Whether it is a monopoly is an open question.
Not good news and in the long run this circular move will fail for them. What are the alternatives?
Wow, nice strategic move and price seems a bit low tbh. Good deal.
I remember when people realized gaming cards could be used for general compute (GPGPU) on certain types of parallel numeric work. It was a very cool thing for many types of hackers and science and engineering students and NVIDIA went far out of their way to ensure we could never buy it.
The optimal market strategy there (as in a lot of places) wasn't "sell as much as you can". There's often a superior strategy, when (as with HPC) you have minority industry customers who are very rich and have low price sensitivity. It's to raise the price to what those special customers are willing to pay, and to drop everyone else.
What NVIDIA did was to rip out FP64 capability, systematically, from all of their consumer cards. They firewalled off "useful for GPGPU" as a differentiating feature, segmented the market, and astronomically raised the price of what (if you were looking soley at cost-to-manufacture) could have been easily affordable to any ramen student.
(It's a more obscure version of the Intel-made-ECC-memory-disappear story).
See, e.g.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47068890 ("15 years of FP64 segmentation, and why the Blackwell Ultra breaks the pattern (nicolasdickenmann.com)")
Yes, this is ironic - it was the tinkerers using CUDA on cheap graphics cards that made Nvidia stuff useful in constrained academic environments.
True about Intel and ECC, but AMD now does similar things, even with their consumer CPUs and chipsets.
These three companies now make very sure that consumer products can never canibalize those juicy data center profits - so they make sure to limit what the consumer segment can do.
Monumental implications on OS
I really hope they retain and pay Georgi Gerganov. We are toast without ggml.
I am just curious, and I genuinely want to know, how is a 150 million a year in revenue company worth 13 billion dollars?
Somewhere, there’s a slide deck that shows future revenue going hockey stick.
Same reason why GitHub was acquired for $7.5B at $250 million ARR which is 30x revenues:
VCs could not see any other reason to raise more money and Huggingface was not growing as fast as they thought to justify the valuation or the next fundraise.
So they might as well get Nvidia to save them from the VCs pressurizing them.
That doesn't make much sense to me. Companies don't just buy companies for absurd multiples out of the niceness of their heart.
In the case of GitHub, it was likely for data reasons + wanting to own where developers do work (VScode + Github).
In the case of HuggingFace, honestly not sure as I'm not familiar enough with their business. But I can assure you that Nvidia didn't buy them for 13 billion cause HuggingFace were desperate. When you're desperate, you sell for less not more.
I hope they're good stewards. This reminds me of the Microsoft GitHub acquisition in terms of the importance to the broader community.
As someone who've played video games and obsessed over graphics cards long before this all started, don't get your hopes up.
as gamers, we got burnt by nvidia way too many times. I'm still holding grudge over shutting down 3dfx.
Nvidia is indeed a terrible company when it comes to open source, etc. however, as someone who has been gaming on desktop hardware since the 6xxx card days, Nvidia hardware has always worked. I switched to Linux full time since the 2XX days (maybe it was the 280 gtx?) and never had a lot of the problems everyone else got on Linux (using only the closed source drivers).
Likewise, their hardware has been rock solid and very performant for me. I bought most of my current setup second hand and they've been going strong for years now.
I think they will be, Nvidia has released open source model that also included the data it was trained on. I think they are the only ones that have done that.
Handing out digging spots if you are the shovel manufacturer sounds reasonable.
As long as the spots continue to be compatible with shovels from other shovel manufacturers
Like some other folks, I wonder whether this will be a good thing, or a bad thing.
I feel like if Nvidia ends up turning into a bad actor, in terms of restricting/censoring models... another HF will spring up.
They were already pretty vocal about it, but this makes Nvidia pretty much the de facto face of open weight models.
As battle lines get drawn over duopoly vs. open weight it’ll be interesting to see what Nvidia does. They definitely want a piece of more of the stack especially as Huawei chips become more and more of an alternative to cuda.
Alibaba already has modelscope and their own chips, and qwen models. Nvidia is doing the same with chips, huggingface and nemotron models
Great for Nvidia. Bad for the rest of us. Oh well, so much for hugging face.
I'm puzzled by the reactions. This is not a good thing. Yes, they're releasing more open source code and models, but they do it BECAUSE OF pressure from the community and other open source projects.
But Nvidia is a terrible open source and consumer company. They gatekeep a lot and oftentimes it's only open source in name. Outside contributions are often slow-walked or rejected if they don't align with business incentives , and leadership is retained 100% in a couple of people from a certain country.
Linus Torvalds: 'Nvidia has been the single worst company we've ever dealt with'
His other comments on Nvidia often contain expletives.
Linus isn't wrong but at the same time NV has shipped more compute than AMD and Intel combined to consumers. The kind of performance I get out of a modest outlay never ceases to amaze me.
Sales volume has no correlation with how good a company is for an ecosystem. See Microsoft, Adobe, Apple, Sony, and so on.
NV is a very different beast from all of those. I have yet to regret buying any of their products and I wouldn't touch your list with a stolen 10' pole.
In fairness, most of those comments were made before Nvidia capitulated in the EGLStream war and released open kernel modules.
Isn't it super easy for the community to just replace HuggingFace? Isn't it pretty much just a repo/index for open-weight models? Why is it even worth anything?
> Isn't it pretty much just a repo/index for open-weight models?
No, its not just a repo/index (they also have training, inference hosting, and they develop/maintain a bunch of core AI infrastructure software), and even if it was just a repo/index, replacing a bug centralized repo/index that used by an large community isn’t trivial.
Not just a repo/index but they also offer reasonably-priced compute, with a free tier not to sniff at, on which to run the models.
Network effects. It's like a social network for LLM nerds as well as hosting and rating models, etc.
It also means that finding models that aren't "approved" will be dealt by other websites.
good or bad, it comes down to a financial decision. Nvidia was willing to offer the highest bidding price, and HF was willing to sell.
Looks like owning the hardware wasn't enough and they want to own the ecosystem as well
Fix your title it's not finalized yet!
According to The Information, it seem it's finalized? https://www.theinformation.com/articles/nvidia-agrees-buy-op...
Best case scenario
The lowest hanging fruit that hf could offer is community monitored commands for running local models.
Right now it is a pain to find the correct incantation.
No, what? Did they just do this to make Chinese models harder to acquire outside of China?
They will just download them from modelscope
What does Linus’s hatred of NVidia drivers imply for this situation?
Huggingface sold out. Sad day. All the good companies lose their 'dont do evil' clause as soon as they make bank
You've sold out when you became VC Funded... It's just a matter of how long the free punch lasts.
What, are you expecting them to just work for good vibes?
To be fair, this is the best thing that can happen for the founders. I don't blame them.
That's a great news for a few rich wallets and bad for all of us.
What’s with all the big acquisitions recently? Is it advantageous for some reason to announce all of this stuff now?
The VC capital for AI is probably drying up. Now the question is: who will buy OpenAI and Anthropic?
The public
Not if they can't indefinitely contain ram and SSD procurement. And they can't and the Market already showed with specex that they are unwilling to float these fly by night outrageous 'investments' onto institutional holders.
Institutional holders mass revolted at spacex getting into the basket.
AI costs more than having people do the work. Q2 CFO reaction proved that.
I wonder if OpenRouter being acquired was a catalyst for this deal.
So is the next step to just basically create a cloud business.
they basically own chips - data centers - discovery etc?
I'm more worry than positive tbh.
Nvidia has already a good free offer with Nim and a lot of compute power available. Plus, they obviously have interest in spreading open models culture.
Its becoming impossible to track all the acquisitions.
Hold on, these say no deal has been reached yet.
HuggingFace offers abliterated/uncensored models, which would seem to run contrary to the "AI is too powerful for regular people" narrative that the big players are pushing.
My primary concern is that Nvidia will bow to the pressure and restrict abliterated/uncensored models on HF.
That is a very good point. I will set aside some storage and download those models that I think are most at risk from a corporate clean-up action.
I don't think nvda has ever pushed the idea that ai is too powerful for regular people.
That's the anthropics and openais of the world.
Big Wolf buying the sheep farm. Nice
I’ve asked ChatGPT etc a few times how Hugging Face makes money. Never quite got to understanding . Good for them.
You could just go to their website and look at the pricing pages? Why are you asking an LLM?
Because I never ever see anyone talking about using it, except for occasional reference to weights.
Gemini did a good job of explaining it. fwiw, it may have helped that i accused Gemini of leading me to a "scam site" like "mega dot com"
nvidia antitrust incoming
I wanted to pray for AMD to attack somehow but then I remembered their owner CEO's are cousins. Should we pray for Chinese GPUs?
Oh jeez
I really wonder why Nvidia would do this.
Owning the roots, the trunk, the branches and the tip of the leafs.
I really wish I'd done better bookmarking back when Nvidia was talking about acquiring ARM. There were all kinds of things coming out saying, if we do this, even though we will be taking over ARM, it will transform us from the inside out. We would become a new different company, that cares about something beyond our own self interest, our own chips.
This feels like a similar leap of faith. One that is hard to believe in. Thankfully, I think Nvidia can keep the lights on here & keep this going. I don't think they have to do much, per se. But it felt implausible then to image an Nvidia that gave a shit about anyone else, an Nvidia that actually gave a flying fuck about drivers or upstream Linux or ecosystems that weren't entirely within their own control.
Similarly the upper quartile of succes here feels mostly like benevolent neglect. I think we can hope for Nvidia to just not mess up a good thing, for them to understand that this open model open ai universe hinges upon Hugging Face, and for them to pretty please keep caring about the existential risk of the hyper-ai'ers all building their own properietary models on proprietary hardware and leaving Nvidia behind some day, and HF being the hedge against being left behind.
whoa
This is huge!
s-1.site
Just like that they lost their ethos. AI oligarchy in the US is now cemented.
um um um um do we want nvidia to be on the same network as hugging face given the recent incidents?
the title of this post is misleading… “in talks” != not “agrees”
It’s not misleading according to the The Information piece (second link)
The story is in an intermediate state right now, but as semiquaver points out, The Information is reporting it as fact. Since their reporting tends to be as reliable as it is hardwalled, we went with their claim in the title.
Anyone old enough to remember anti trust laws or even just laws?
Please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.
No doubt you have the nucleus of a substantive comment here, but that's not enough. If you only post the shallowest top stratum of what you're thinking, other people do the same, and then we get "Laws are for poor people" and endless descending repetition. The whole point of this site is to try for something other than that.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
p.s. Also, please don't be snarky on HN. That's also in the guidelines.
I thin HF holds huge power in how they’ve consolidated all the open models and data, but monopoly feels like a stretch here. They are in reality a fairly small startup with lots of alternatives (all of which are much worse at this point granted) and are mostly a loss leading part of the open source ecosystem. I think it would be very hard to make a case against this on monopoly grounds, though I wouldn’t be opposed to someone trying if they thought it was possible.
Laws are for poor people
The AI judge doesn’t have that feature yet
tldr: the marketplace for opensource models became wide open