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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.

>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...

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 for one welcome our new robot overlords.

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.

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).

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.

> 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.

Nvidia is a public company. What VC money?

Yeah this is the "early netflix" era. Take advantage while you can and plan for the future.

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

Totally, and as long as they don't turn on the AWS NAT Gateway, they'll be just fine.

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.

If the acquisitions of late tell us anything at all, it's that Nvidia wants to be a vertical AI company, not a hardware or gaming company.

Well, if they didn't want a dominant investor, they didn't get one, they got acquired.

Sounds like it was just too much money for the stakeholders to refuse

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 :)".

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

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

Truer words were never spoken. This is painfully true.

Yeah I'm afraid they will only keep cuda support for their software. Good thing it's all Open source

Acquisition of GitHub let to increased downtimes, but also to unlimited private repos for the free tier.

Didn’t we just witness it? Become a critical ecosystem player then get acquired based on the value of that position.

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.

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.

it's literally the GitHub for AI

ondemand cloud? b2b?

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

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

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

If you can't beat them, buy them. Hallmark of late-stage capitalism.

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.

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.

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.

As someone who've played video games and obsessed over graphics cards long before this all started, don't get your hopes up.

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.

Alibaba already has modelscope and their own chips, and qwen models. Nvidia is doing the same with chips, huggingface and nemotron models

According to The Information, it seem it's finalized? https://www.theinformation.com/articles/nvidia-agrees-buy-op...

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.

They will just download them from modelscope

The VC capital for AI is probably drying up. Now the question is: who will buy OpenAI and Anthropic?

Linus Torvalds: 'Nvidia has been the single worst company we've ever dealt with'

His other comments on Nvidia often contain expletives.

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?

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.

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.

You could just go to their website and look at the pricing pages? Why are you asking an LLM?

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"

Owning the roots, the trunk, the branches and the tip of the leafs.

It’s not misleading according to the The Information piece (second link)

  > Nvidia Agrees to Buy Open Source Model Repository Hugging Face For $12.9 Billion

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.

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