Nvidia has agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.93 billion. On Sept. 3 local time, major foreign media reported that the acquisition will give Nvidia an AI model sharing and distribution platform used by more than 18 million people.

The deal expands Nvidia’s business into software for developers to build and deploy AI. Hugging Face is an open-source AI platform for sharing models, datasets and development tools.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (젠슨 황) said more than 18 million developers, researchers and creators on Hugging Face share more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets and 1 million applications.

Nvidia said it will keep Hugging Face an open platform after the acquisition. Developers will be able to freely choose models, frameworks, cloud providers and computing platforms as before.

Nvidia hardware is not a prerequisite for building or deploying AI on Hugging Face. Nvidia has already posted more than 500 models and 250 public datasets on Hugging Face. Hugging Face will also continue to support other developers’ models and multiple cloud and accelerator providers.

The deal comes about a month after Hugging Face disclosed a security breach caused by unauthorized access by autonomous AI agents. Internal datasets and service credentials were exposed at the time, but no evidence was confirmed that public models, datasets and applications were tampered with.