https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/24/hugging-face-reportedly-in...
https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/24/hugging-face-reportedly-in...
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.
Unless I’m missing something, this feels like Nvidia having more money than they know what to do with.
> Nvidia Agrees to Buy Open Source Model Repository Hugging Face For $12.9 BillionNo 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.
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.
His other comments on Nvidia often contain expletives.
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.
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).
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 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.
I hope nvidia does right by the community.
Edit to add: $13B should cover the S3 egress fees for a couple months :D
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.
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.
My primary concern is that Nvidia will bow to the pressure and restrict abliterated/uncensored models on HF.
That's the anthropics and openais of the world.
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.
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.
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.
Right now it is a pain to find the correct incantation.
(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...
they basically own chips - data centers - discovery etc?
Google is obvious.
Hugging Face is a file download mirror with a couple of side features dangling off.
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.
–Some guys in every bubble I’ve witnessed.
They sell a few cloud services, but the most valuable thing in their portfolio is live, engaged accounts from pretty much every person directly interested in running AI models.
If you were an org positioned to do sell better cloud services on a wildly better margin, wanted to promote consumer-binned AI hardware from your manufacturing chain, or wanted to promote new AI enterprise or research-support initiatives, those accounts would seem to be an absurdly fantastic collection of warm leads that you could gradually mine and upsell (and critically: that your competitors could no longer buy/use themselves).
The era of VC-funded home-delivery recipe boxes is still my favourite.
Avicebron•1h ago