NVIDIA to Acquire Hugging Face for $12.93 Billion

BlockBeats News, September 3rd, NVIDIA announced that it has agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.9303 billion. The two parties will work together to scale up the Hugging Face platform, strengthen its infrastructure, and enable global developers and organizations to access AI capabilities more widely. Huang Renxun stated that Hugging Face will continue to serve as an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem. Developers can choose their desired models, frameworks, cloud services, and inference service providers, as well as computing platforms. Developing or deploying through Hugging Face does not require the use of NVIDIA's computing resources. NVIDIA mentioned that the equity retention plan for Hugging Face employees joining NVIDIA could reach up to $1 billion. The transaction is expected to be completed in the first half of 2027, subject to regulatory approval.

Last week, Pollen Robotics, a subsidiary of Hugging Face, released Microduck, a $399 bipedal robot. It is only 25 cm tall, weighs about 800 grams, but packs 15 motors, a camera, LiDAR, and two IMUs. Out of the box, it can walk, sit down, grab things, play soccer, get up after falling, and even glide when equipped with wheels. Microduck's movements can be retrained by the user. Users first train the actions in the MuJoCo physics simulator using reinforcement learning and then transfer the trained policy to the real machine. The SDK, simulator, and complete reinforcement learning training stack have all been open-sourced, and the entire software suite is licensed under Apache 2.0.