Nvidia acquires Huggingface incl. llama for aprox $13billion

[iMo]

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

[brucehoult]

I see no mention of Llama in the article, which is not surprising since it is owned by Meta.

[tim_]

I see no mention of Llama in the article, which is not surprising since it is owned by Meta.

llama.cpp

[booscrawl]

I see no mention of Llama in the article, which is not surprising since it is owned by Meta.

llama.cpp

ggml AI specifically.

[ejeffrey]

Does this many any sense to anyone?

AFAIU, hugging face is basically a git large file store full of open weight LLM models?  I understand how that provides value to the AI ecosystem, and probably indirectly helps make NVidia money merely by existing.  But I don't understand how NVidia makes a $13B return off this investment.  Like where is the direct revenue?  Or how does NVidia controlling this lead to more indirect revenue?  I have heard they offer GPU hosting, I assume for people fine tuning or quantizing open weight models.  That accounts for the majority of their $150M (that's million with an M) in revenue.

[abeyer]

Does this many any sense to anyone?

AFAIU, hugging face is basically a git large file store full of open weight LLM models?  I understand how that provides value to the AI ecosystem, and probably indirectly helps make NVidia money merely by existing.  But I don't understand how NVidia makes a $13B return off this investment.  Like where is the direct revenue?  Or how does NVidia controlling this lead to more indirect revenue?  I have heard they offer GPU hosting, I assume for people fine tuning or quantizing open weight models.  That accounts for the majority of their $150M (that's million with an M) in revenue.

Could just be a "commoditize your complement" play in general. Even if they gain no direct revenue from it, they block other players from acquiring them or hugging face seeking other monetization paths that don't play to Nvidia's benefit.

And we keep the bubble froth, froth, frothing along.

[booscrawl]

Does this many any sense to anyone?

AFAIU, hugging face is basically a git large file store full of open weight LLM models?  I understand how that provides value to the AI ecosystem, and probably indirectly helps make NVidia money merely by existing.  But I don't understand how NVidia makes a $13B return off this investment.  Like where is the direct revenue?  Or how does NVidia controlling this lead to more indirect revenue?  I have heard they offer GPU hosting, I assume for people fine tuning or quantizing open weight models.  That accounts for the majority of their $150M (that's million with an M) in revenue.

https://www.commonroom.io/research/hugging-face/business-model/

[brucehoult]

I see no mention of Llama in the article, which is not surprising since it is owned by Meta.

llama.cpp

I know what it is. I run it at home.

The text "llama" literally does not appear anywhere on that web page that Chrome search can find.

[abeyer]

llama.cpp

I know what it is. I run it at home.

The text "llama" literally does not appear anywhere on that web page that Chrome search can find.

It was pointed out (though perhaps somewhat obliquely) in several prior comments:

llama.cpp (and the underlying ggml library it is based on) were built and maintained by ggml.ai, which was already acquired by hugging face, and thus will also become part of Nvidia in this deal.

[ejeffrey]

https://www.commonroom.io/research/hugging-face/business-model/

I'm not sure what the point of that was?  I know what hugging face is, I don't need an AI slop article to describe the basic facts.

My question is: nvidia paid $13B for this company.  By any normal standard, they should be expecting that to result in at least an extra billion dollars a year in revenue.  How does a glorified FTP server used by a fairly small niche of developers generate a billion dollars in revenue?  If not, how else does this acquisition directly or indirectly drive that much revenue?

[ejeffrey]

llama.cpp

I know what it is. I run it at home.

The text "llama" literally does not appear anywhere on that web page that Chrome search can find.

It was pointed out (though perhaps somewhat obliquely) in several prior comments:

llama.cpp (and the underlying ggml library it is based on) were built and maintained by ggml.ai, which was already acquired by hugging face, and thus will also become part of Nvidia in this deal.

And specifically llama.cpp is not owned or affiliated with Meta other than that it started as a reimplementation of the code Meta released to run their llama language model. 

[brucehoult]

llama.cpp

I know what it is. I run it at home.

The text "llama" literally does not appear anywhere on that web page that Chrome search can find.

It was pointed out (though perhaps somewhat obliquely) in several prior comments:

llama.cpp (and the underlying ggml library it is based on) were built and maintained by ggml.ai, which was already acquired by hugging face, and thus will also become part of Nvidia in this deal.

Oh I see. I get my copy directly from SpacemiT's binary repo.

Being MIT license, you can't really describe it as being owned by Huggingface or Nvidia. They might put the most work into it, and have the most expertise, certainly — or at least a handful of main contributors do, not the company that for the moment employs them.

[abeyer]

Being MIT license, you can't really describe it as being owned by Huggingface or Nvidia. They might put the most work into it, and have the most expertise, certainly — or at least a handful of main contributors do, not the company that for the moment employs them.

AFAIK they do actually own the original copyright to at least the library, so could relicense it and/or not release future versions as MIT if they really wanted to. Doesn't seem likely, unless maybe they start selling a commercial supported version along side, or similar.

[tom66]

Not just "approx $13bn".  They paid exactly $12.9303bn.  129303 is 0x1F917, and U+1F917 is the emoji 🤗 (https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+1F917).  i.e. the Hugging Face.

#129303 is also this colour: nVidia

So they paid a specific amount for a meme...

I'm sure the AI business is totally based on sustainable and real world values and not just a massive hype bubble... yeah.

[crystalfish]

I see no mention of Llama in the article, which is not surprising since it is owned by Meta.

llama.cpp

thanks for the information!

[stj]

Nvidia is just throwing more balls into the air to distract from the fact that it's involved in a not-so-complex investment pumping operation with Lucky Larry (not Silvrestein, the other Larry) and others.


this is less of a bubble and more of a shining star that will eventually turn into a black hole and suck all the investers in!

[rteodor]

this is less of a bubble and more of a shining star that will eventually turn into a black hole and suck all the investers in!

Not quite so. Only the lucky investors that are close enough to the core are sucked in. The rest (of us) are pulverized as elementary particles at near light speed throughout the universe to wander forever and ever with no purpose or meaning or money in the bank account.

[Zondar]

There is a tussle going on about open-weight models at the moment.

There's "China is making open models, therefore open is bad."
There's "We (e.g. OpenAI and Anthropic) produce closed models, therefore open is bad."
There's "Open models can be used and modified privately for nefarious purposes, therefore open is bad."

On the other hand, Nvidia sees that a growing portion of its hardware sales are going to companies and individuals who want to run local models, and Nvidia likely wants to protect that market. I think that's the idea behind this purchase, since HF would quickly become replaced by others if their goal was to bury it or to restrict access.

The big threat is politics. Good luck clamping down on nation-state's developments, but the large incumbent companies absolutely will try have rent-seeking laws passed, e.g. to restrict people's use to only their officially-approved models, and to criminalize normal people like you and me "terrorists" that dare to use an open model.

[tom66]

Yeah, now models like e.g. GLM-5.3-Flash can be run on hardware that is within the reach of SMEs (~£10-20k) then we know that the big guys are going to struggle to compete.  These models are nearly as capable as Claude Opus 4.7-4.8.  I would say open weights models are only about 6 months behind the frontier labs now.  That's not that much of a difference, especially when you can finetune and modify these open weights models to match your specific needs, and have a guarantee that the model you run today will be the same model you run tomorrow.

[Siwastaja]

Yeah, now models like e.g. GLM-5.3-Flash can be run on hardware that is within the reach of SMEs (~£10-20k) then we know that the big guys are going to struggle to compete.  These models are nearly as capable as Claude Opus 4.7-4.8. 

Is there any public example demonstrating this "nearly as capable" factor or is it just wishful thinking?

Further, why would the original authors whose work was copied "struggle" to compete? By definition, those who develop are always ahead of those who copy. The only factor where copies win would be price.

There are public demonstrations of these full size versions, like the GLM-5.3 (full size version, non-quantized, post-trained by illicit use of Anthropic/OpenAI/Gemini/Grok infra) being capable of roughly the Opus 4.5-4.7-level performance, but that does not automagically generalize into order of magnitude smaller distilled versions. If that was true, why the big players don't serve such smaller versions of their models, why Google's small model results embedded in the search results are still utter crap, and why everyone still uses the big models to do any serious work?

So "nearly" as good, nah, jury is still out on that. If they did work, people would use them to do the same tasks, so why doesn't that happen? If something sounds too good to be true, then why not consider the possibility it likely isn't? Why speculate, go do some real work with these small models? So far it's all