Little bit of a “the more you know” moment.

Historically NYSE (and AMEX; thought of in this specific context as CTA) had a lock on 1-3 character symbols. NASDAQ (via UTP) had a lock on 4-6 character symbols.

For a long time you could tell where something was listed purely by looking at the length of the symbol it traded under.

This all changed in the late 2000s or so, so no longer useful information.

I honestly would leave the industry if one of the exchanges tried to bend the industry to allow an emoji in a symbol. The communication protocols essentially lock this at 8 character alpha. It would be a huge pain in the ass, for everyone, to change this just because some exchange wants to appeal to a potential listing.

I heavily disagree.

Nvidia has a strong interest in open source AI being a strong contender to proprietary models. They don't want a single AI company to win, as that company would then have enormous leverage over Nvidia, and could perhaps even erode the Cuda moat with their own chip spending.

They want the AI market to be hypercompetitive, with AI companies focusing on competing amongst themselves instead of with Nvidia on one side, and many self-hosters / small inference providers buying Nvidia GPUs for large open models on the other.

It's in Nvidia's business interest to be a good steward of Huggingface, while being a good steward of Github is at best incidental to the interests of Microsoft.

What happened to GitHub?

To be fair Microsoft haven’t done as much integration with their eco system; such as integrating it with Azure DevOps as they could. And long may it continue.

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 releases some of the most open open weights models, Nemotron 3, which have the full training code open, and most but not all of the training datasets.

Nvidia is a big company. They are good about some things and bad about others.

I think they really do like open weights because they make some of the best hardware for training, and the more open weights models there are, the more people are training and fine-tuning them, mostly on Nvidia hardware.

I feel like Nvidia is one of the better choices for buying Huggingface. Not perfect, but definitely far from the worst.

Arguably, this move will help AI open source market more. Nvidia has an incentive to make AI open source competitive with closed source. If OpenAI or Anthropic gains in market share, they will eventually gain power over hardware vendors as well, which Nvidia does not want.

Nvidia wants people and companies to go choose a free open model, run that model on Nvidia hardware. And because Nvidia can't fully control what hardware an AI model can run, Apple Silicon and AMD hardware users will benefit as well.

As a AMD GPU user, I feel as if trying to mandate CUDA only or some other way to increase NVIDIA lock in like that would be met with people leaving the platform or at lest simply working on the non NVIDIA formats away from hugging face. Though requiring a lot of space it's quite easy to spin up a competitor at least for hosting weights. And if they try some legal shenanigans then many countries outside the US will still be happy to host I am sure why not China?

The only thing I can see them being able to get away with is increasingly bending the hugging face python API and any other features of that sort they develop to NVIDIA only. I personally don't use that and don't see a reason to and I am not sure how many people do use the hugging face python library.

I think this is part of an open-source play. I'm not arguing your other points, I think they're true.

They're trying to mix up the competitive landscape(that doesn't impact their bottom line, and I don't think opensource is eating their lunch), so I don't think this is fake, at least that's my initial take.

Disagree. When it comes to AI, mvidia has been one of the most open labs. They open source a lot things and are open to contributions

Hey. I worked there, and I'm no longer bound by their PR policy, so I can mention this. Also, know that the fact that I worked there doesn't make me privy to their high-level strategic decisions, this is a more look from the trenches kind of thing.

My impression I've developed in the years of working there is that Nvidia's relationship with opensource is... not intentional. They kinda suck at it because they genuinely don't know how to do it more than they want to make money out of it.

Here's an anecdotal "success story" which is also an illustration to how things might not work out well otherwise.

So, I was on the team that deals with server infrastructure. One day we get a new "feature" which was supposed to allow Slurm (the workload manager, a kind of software used to run "jobs", including eg. model training) to be deployed with distributed MySQL as a backend. The feature is all obviously written by a single developer with an enormous amount of "help" from AI. I was tasked with testing it.

Trying to figure out what it does... I realized that the "distributed" part of the feature was to be achieved by integrating with Oracle's MySQL by means of using MySQLShell (another proprietary Oracle's product). Until that point, by default, we integrated with MariaDB. Not only was it using Oracle's proprietary tool, the tool, actually, didn't support the "distributed" part of the "solution". It was pitched as the "first step on the way there".

So, I was able to push back on it, mentioning Galera, arguing that the "solution" doesn't solve the problem and will require from customers to change databases (even if they are mostly compatible... they never quite 100% compatible). And the misfeature was rolled back.

I made an effort to investigate how did we even get there, and turned out that whoever authored the "solution" had an experience of working with Oracle products, but never really tried the open-source ones. So, he didn't do a research. He just used what he knew.

Unfortunately, this is a rare win, where the evidence of disadvantages of using proprietary solution was huge and enough to turn the tide. But often it doesn't face any resistance because nobody is even aware of the problem.

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.

As opposed to whom else? Do you think any of the other labs or acccelerators are clamoring for open source hardware?

> They want

> They want

[citation needed]

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.

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.

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

Ah yes Spacy, good times :)

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

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.

Also they bought the company which develops the open source slurm scheduler which is the primary and defacto standard HPC scheduler on the market. Bit of a concern to say the least

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

Oh yeah, so surprising to refuse $500M that go in the pockets of your company that is now owned in large part by the investor, but then accept $13B that go directly in your own pockets.

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 :)".

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...

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

Is huggingface profitable?

I'm not a fan of big-tech acquisition results either, but one benefit can be that a product continues to exist when it would otherwise become insolvent.

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.

Truer words were never spoken. This is painfully true.

Nokia buying Qt in 2008 brought an LGPL option.

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.

Agree. this sucks already.

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

Here is an employee of HF at a time answering how do they make money, supposedly [1]

> We make money via compute credits + Enterprise Hub + HF Pro subs [...]

I guess this plus custom inference deployments, external inference providers, partnerships with the big cloud AWS, Azure, etc.

[1] https://x.com/reach_vb/status/1928050126498713706

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.

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 :)

Isn't this pretty much the model for any tech company? Rush to get MVP released, stoke the hype, cash in on FOMO.

an FTP server delivering tarballs.

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?

It hugs your face

I think everyone just reads *illion and thinks 'lots of money'.

The amounts are incomprehensible at this point. I don't think anyone can conceive of 13 billion dollars accurately, including the people brokering this deal, they're just thinking of bargaining chips and weighing them in comparison to how many they have.

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

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.

The Government plans to regulate open source ai. Nvidea is dependent on the Government to back loans, provide property, and make laws in their favor. Now they have ownership of what the Government wants to control. A perfect wedge they can use to get more from the Government.

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

We're entering consolidation

Nvidia is a public company. What VC money?

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

We live in now?

Has always been this way. Big companies always seek to buy fast growing startups and unfortunately the founders of these startups mostly take the money.

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.

Huggingface is not a product, it's a community. It's the go-to place where everyone who has anything to do with open AI models gathers. You could trivially reproduce their stack, but building such a huge AI community around a single place is probably impossible by now.

Do they really need HF for that?

Dgx Spark and Strix Halo have very close specs and deliver similar performance. If nvidia makes their stack be more efficient with for example 50% more tockens on similar hardware specs agaist competitors, they don't need HF.

My take is that Chinese Labs, though slightly behind on the frontier (due to compute constraints) are on a trajectory to surpass Western labs (this is me speculating, reasons are better ecosystem creation on China's part and potentially better/more data environment). Qwen-3.5-122b was the king in it's category and noone came up with something better, even though many tried like poolside with laguna. Similar with 35b and 27b param models. I think poolside and HF acquisitions show us that nvidia really wants to have competitive models on the prosumer (~100-150b param size) and likely at the 300-500b as well. Together with a hardware to run them that's a good market to be in. And as the recently rumored Xiaomi AI cube shows us (together with gorgon/medusa halo and mac studios), this is a market segment that will have competition.

That could be a factor, but the optimistic interpretation would be that they want to support the open ecosystem because it sells more chips.

Models are already largely hardware agnostic. It would be pretty hard to put that cat back in the bag.

I could imagine them building value-added services on top of HF to advantage Nvidia products (i.e. "run this model on NVIDIA cloud" with one-click), but in this moment it's hard to imagine how they could actively disadvantage models built to run on other platforms.

I am quite skeptical that an acquisition by Nvidia will make people move somewhere else ... The network effect remains central, if you are researcher/lab/company and you want to promote your model/dataset you go to the popular platform where most of the community is. The same way most of the public repo are still being published on GitHub despite people being pissed of by Microsoft acquisition. (I you add on top of that the cost changing your workflow, not using HF library, ... it make the transition even more difficult)

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

I don't know anyone who "finds" models on HF. The announcements always come through Reddit, HN, Xitter, and various Discords. HF is just a place where some people bought a domain name, spun up a file server, and struck it rich. If they went away tomorrow, they'd be replaced the next day.

To play devil's advocate: Hugging Face was probably not profitable, and someone has to pay the bills long-term. Nvidia benefits from Hugging Face and the operating costs are pennies to them. For them it makes sense to acquire HF just to keep it running. HF shutting down or self-destructing in the search of profits would be costlier for Nvidia than just buying it now

That said, I share all your concerns. The days of a permissive hands-off HF may be numbered

While nvidia may not want open source drivers, they want open weight models and this acquisition allows them to keep pushing for that.

Commoditize your complement.

+1 on @SillyUsername. Combined with recent acquisition of OpenRouter we see exactly what we were increasingly concerned about: tightening (chocking?) of Open Weights locally-run models. The sequence and timing of these events make the intent very clear.

Now the Open-Models crowd will try to move to some other place. But fragmentation will weaken the position. Yes, there is Civic, there are purely Chinese websites ... for those who speaks Mandarin. Which only reinforces the point.

Nvidia does frequently release new OSS Nemotron models where they implement new mechanisms.

NVIDIA is open source software first for almost everything. You cherry pick a couple of things, but it's not the general sentiment.

Why? If anything it makes complete sense:

1) Local inference means more general GPUs and less ASIC hardware. Only big companies can push ASIC because of the software required, meanwhile nVidia owns cuda which is the standard.

2) Local is less resource-efficient per chip (chips remaining idle much more, meaning more chips required).

3) End-customers have less bargaining power compared to hyper-scalers. Although this might change if customer hardware start behaving more like phones (SoC with everything packed in), but even then the SoC makers will likely still have less bargaining power than hyper-scalers. But then nVidia could potentially make the whole SoC too.

So overall local-inference users = higher profit margins for nvidia. They much rather have every business on the globe buy one nvidia rack (or every laptop have a beefy GPU) than have 5-10 hyperscalers buy a few hundred thousand.

Nvidia is also pushing for local inference IMHO. They want open models and competition in the model layer, not two big labs controlling all of it.

You forget that Nvidia has also been the top consumer GPU player for 20 years.

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.

The same is true for the simultaneous NVENC video encoding session limit which is artificially locked for consumer NVIDIA GPUs (see https://github.com/keylase/nvidia-patch)

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.

Somewhere, there’s a slide deck that shows future revenue going hockey stick.

Strategically, it matters - and nvidia’s strategy is to basically own the entire industrial supply chain of the future - they have interests in their suppliers, their competitors, their users.

In this case, Nvidia wants the easiest route from:

find model -> adapt model -> optimise model -> run model

to terminate inside the Nvidia stack. This is a boon for DGX cloud.

If they are mostly paid in NVDA stock and NVDA is also valued at 40x revenues or whatever insane multiple then it makes sense.

> Here have some of my monopoly money I can print and come join us at Nvidia!

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/nvidia-agrees-buy-op... is a little more definitive but paywalled and still doesn't confirm the other side of the deal - Hugging Face agreeing to the purchase.

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.

of course it is

works fine for now

whats nvidia gonna do except make it worse?

usually buyouts go something like this:

1 buy company

2 fire various people

3 enshittify

hugging face even said they didnt want to accept a 500 million dollar investment from nvidia, because they didnt want nvidia to run the ship.

instead they sell it... guess who'll run the ship?

https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/24/hugging-face-reportedly-in...

Sounds like that's what z.ai did to get GLM-5.3-Flash running on Huawei chips.

Money always wins, sadly.

I mean, it's $500M versus $13B.

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.

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

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

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.

Why is any file hosting service ever a thing at all, when literally any file can simply be distributed via torrents?

Then someone would still create a website with an index of all the open models. Where people discuss & rank the models, show related models, ...

And now you've recreated most of HF

Why don't we use message boards instead of Google? Couldn't websites be distributed via direct DNS requests instead of Google serving links?

You are not the first or 100th person to come up with this idea. I don't really get it either but there must be a reason it hasn't really happened.

The important thing about HuggingFace isn't the safetensors files, it's the READMEs and the Google search placement. It's easy to reproduce their distribution with torrents, it's very hard to then establish yourself as the default option.

It would be far more efficient to decentralize the data. But HF provides convenience, they subsidize the cost. They gained millions of users, and many enterprises. They can now sell the popularity of their platform. Nobody can buy a p2p network of people.

> Forgive me for newb question, but why Hugging Face is a thing at all?

Because you can't host arbitrarily large files on github, it's basically become a defacto "publish your project here" thing.

For a CN domestic equivalent take a look at Modelscope.

Well, ask yourself: "Why am I on Hacker News?". You could just "as easy" use free / opensource alternatives like Lemmy, Mastodon, etc.

Very "why would anyone use Dropbox when I can setup a SFTP server" vibes.

beating the dead horse after other dozen comments, but the same reason we use github / gitlab instead of using Savannah

hugging face is basically a real easy way to run llms. They also provide a bunch of libraries to do things like split compute across all your resources.

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?

It was either they (literally) sell out or enshittify. Choose your poison. Hosting and running LLMs is an expensive business to be in. There wasn't ever going to be a good ending to this story. The original investors need to be made whole.

To be fair, this is the best thing that can happen for the founders. I don't blame them.

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

No, its just the final stage of the bubble before it all comes crashing down. :)

They will just download them from modelscope

Pretty sure Nvidias dream is that OpenAI and Anthropic get into a hacking war using Nvidia cards.

The problem for them is that the leading provider of training and inference is actually AWS...

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"

Why would the most rich and evil company on the field want to own a practical monopoly?

Ai companies are making their own chips, Apple unified and other unified ram solutions also a threat

Nvidia is making tons of money by selling GPUs at a very high profit margin. They will do anything to remain dominant

Keep alive the on-prem hardware sales? Not as big part likely but still something good to have. On-prem hardware needs models to be available to be useful. So pushing those could sell more on-prem hardware.

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

Licensing. (And there is no 2nd Amendment for this one)

could you elaborate on what happened?

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

I also see this as an antitrust case, but to see that, you need to be much more up to date on technology than anyone who decides such things.

It's comparable to the biggest bank buying the biggest ratings agency.

Let's file an antitrust complain.

Not just on this HF acquisition, but on the whole ecosystem monopoly.

They absolutely should, but what would be their impact on American companies buying each other out?