Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B • Hacker News Board

Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B

#321

Post by koolala » Thu, Aug 27, 2026, 6:10 AM UTC

bigyabai wrote: post #307

matheusmoreira wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You do own the hardware. Nvidia GPUs have FOSS driver alternatives (Nouveau, NOVA) and have supported OpenCL on the proprietary drivers since 2009. If you don't want to use CUDA, they expose the PTX bindings to write your own CUDA alternative too: https://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/parallel-thread-execution/index...

I wish OpenCL was usable today like your implying...

Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B

#322

Post by DiabloD3 » Thu, Aug 27, 2026, 6:10 AM UTC

Heh, thats a weird way to announced the death of HuggingFace.

Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B

#323

Post by matesz » Thu, Aug 27, 2026, 6:11 AM UTC

Forgive me for newb question, but why Hugging Face is a thing at all? Couldn't models be simply distributed via torrents? And the whole aggregator thing would come down to indexing magent links published by model providers?

Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B

#324

Post by roschdal » Thu, Aug 27, 2026, 6:12 AM UTC

Nvidia overpaid for Hugging Face.

Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B

#325

Post by nicman23 » Thu, Aug 27, 2026, 6:12 AM UTC

not even 27b :C

Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B

#326

Post by abrookewood » Thu, Aug 27, 2026, 6:13 AM UTC

jdejean wrote: post #81

Gigachad wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://huggingface.co/pricing

I don't understand who this is targeted at. You can download the models, clone the datasets free. Who is paying them and why?

Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B

#327

Post by hirako2000 » Thu, Aug 27, 2026, 6:15 AM UTC

r0b05 wrote: post #182

bbor wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

80x its yearly revenue. Clearly they aren't buying HF for margins.

In fact, has HF ever wished to make money? They probably pay AWS more infra cost than they earn. The exit was planned all along.

Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B

#328

Post by jgilias » Thu, Aug 27, 2026, 6:17 AM UTC

dannyw wrote: post #133

GeertB wrote: post #108

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 sof…

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 trainin…

_why_ have people started to call companies “labs”?!

Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B

#329

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Aug 27, 2026, 6:18 AM UTC

matesz wrote: post #323

Forgive me for newb question, but why Hugging Face is a thing at all? Couldn't models be simply distributed via torrents? And the whole aggregator thing would come down to indexing magent links published by model providers?

[deleted]

Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B

#330

Post by pjmlp » Thu, Aug 27, 2026, 6:19 AM UTC

bayindirh wrote: post #316

bigyabai wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do own the hardware. Nvidia GPUs have FOSS driver alternatives (Nouveau, NOVA) and have supported OpenCL on the proprietary drivers since 2009. If you don't want to use CUDA, they expose the PTX bindings to write your own CUDA alternative too: https://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/parallel-thread-execution/index...

When last looked at it, NVIDIA was not supporting OpenCL beyond 1.0. Also, when running OpenCL, NVIDIA hardware disables multiple DMA engines, and allows only one memory transfer at a time to prevent OpenCL running as fast as CUDA. Did NVIDIA finally allow open source drivers to access all parts and features of the card to allow feature parity? Last time I checked they were considering a plan for planning a solution…

People love to blame NVidia on OpenCL failure, maybe Intel and AMD should actually deliver something compute researchers want to use?