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Discussion (229 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Don't expect things to go differently this time around. Nvidia wants control over the software stack. Acquiring HF fits in perfectly. The play is long term.
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.
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.
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...
> This is actually one of the benefits brought by AI; it has made Nvidia a good participant in the Linux kernel space. [...] Now, when Linux is so important for AI clouds, Nvidia suddenly cares very much about Linux.
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.
But more seriously, this is my first time seeing that as well, and I'm not sure I like it. Citing an LLM is a little like citing Wikipedia to me, you cite the primary source the LLM is quoting directly, not the secondary 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.
Whereas mojo is a general purpose language, and we're absolutely spoiled for choice on modern languages with open source compilers.
I'm not saying it's fair or right, I still think mojo is neat, but isn't exactly comparing apples to apples.
Nvidia on the other hand has not and the best they have done is a bunch of closed-source blobs which they do more closed source releases than the rest.
Mojo is open source and targets all GPU architectures for their compiler regardless of the vendor and nvcc targets their own (and both that and CUDA are closed source).
So this is directly an apples to apples comparison.
possibly because it took qualcomm buying them to make that happen.
Mojo was partially open source before Qualcomm bought them, and they were going to do open source it anyway.
Was NVCC or CUDA ever open source since the lifetime of its development?
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.
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).
Have been for a long time. All of the big techs should have been broken up long ago.
The era of VC-funded home-delivery recipe boxes is still my favourite.
Its likely in the near future we will be able to buy 128gb mac minis and run local AI for free.
I hope nvidia does right by the community.
Edit to add: $13B should cover the S3 egress fees for a couple months :D
Owning HF -- the discovery and distribution channel -- is one thing, but I think the biggest threat vector is the privileged access to HF platform data, that includes HW survey info and model download pattern. This can be a borderline anti-trust case.
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...
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 :)".
(Ggml.ai is llama.cpp.)
Curious if the “I consider HuggingFace more "Open AI" than OpenAI” sentiment in that top comment will still apply with NVIDIA as the boss now...
If Nvidia buying HF makes it tough for all the diverse models on HF, then what are some alternatives?
It seems models are the best things to be available on a Torrent platform? Of course HF is much more than just the files but perhaps the metadata can be separate and hosted on multiple community platforms.
good old torrents
–Some guys in every bubble I’ve witnessed.
Nvidia has a market cap of $5T USD today, and a decent chunk of that is due to LLM speculation.
Does Nvidia want their stock price to be at risk of being tanked by a download service being in the news? No, they want to make sure the party keeps going and is under their direct supervision, and part of that is making sure Hugging Face isn't bought by a competitor or runs out of money.
To stop that! Literally. To stop those services being free.
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.
Unless I’m missing something, this feels like Nvidia having more money than they know what to do with.
I do worry about any sort of crowding out or downplaying non Nvidia-relevant quants, and about changing rules to crack down on models or datasets that for one reason or another “don’t align with their corporate values” - uncensored etc. Someone mentioned Microsoft and GitHub, they appear to me anyway to have been very hands off, I hope it’s the same model.
The optimal market strategy there (as in a lot of places) wasn't "sell as much as you can". There's often a superior strategy, when (as with HPC) you have minority industry customers who are very rich and have low price sensitivity. It's to raise the price to what those special customers are willing to pay, and to drop everyone else.
What NVIDIA did was to rip out FP64 capability, systematically, from all of their consumer cards. They firewalled off "useful for GPGPU" as a differentiating feature, segmented the market, and astronomically raised the price of what (if you were looking soley at cost-to-manufacture) could have been easily affordable to any ramen student.
(It's a more obscure version of the Intel-made-ECC-memory-disappear story).
See, e.g.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47068890 ("15 years of FP64 segmentation, and why the Blackwell Ultra breaks the pattern (nicolasdickenmann.com)")
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.
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.
In the case of GitHub, it was likely for data reasons + wanting to own where developers do work (VScode + Github).
In the case of HuggingFace, honestly not sure as I'm not familiar enough with their business. But I can assure you that Nvidia didn't buy them for 13 billion cause HuggingFace were desperate. When you're desperate, you sell for less not more.
As battle lines get drawn over duopoly vs. open weight it’ll be interesting to see what Nvidia does. They definitely want a piece of more of the stack especially as Huawei chips become more and more of an alternative to cuda.
I feel like if Nvidia ends up turning into a bad actor, in terms of restricting/censoring models... another HF will spring up.
Right now it is a pain to find the correct incantation.
Institutional holders mass revolted at spacex getting into the basket.
AI costs more than having people do the work. Q2 CFO reaction proved that.
But Nvidia is a terrible open source and consumer company. They gatekeep a lot and oftentimes it's only open source in name. Outside contributions are often slow-walked or rejected if they don't align with business incentives , and leadership is retained 100% in a couple of people from a certain country.
His other comments on Nvidia often contain expletives.
No, its not just a repo/index (they also have training, inference hosting, and they develop/maintain a bunch of core AI infrastructure software), and even if it was just a repo/index, replacing a bug centralized repo/index that used by an large community isn’t trivial.
they basically own chips - data centers - discovery etc?
My primary concern is that Nvidia will bow to the pressure and restrict abliterated/uncensored models on HF.
That's the anthropics and openais of the world.
This feels like a similar leap of faith. One that is hard to believe in. Thankfully, I think Nvidia can keep the lights on here & keep this going. I don't think they have to do much, per se. But it felt implausible then to image an Nvidia that gave a shit about anyone else, an Nvidia that actually gave a flying fuck about drivers or upstream Linux or ecosystems that weren't entirely within their own control.
Similarly the upper quartile of succes here feels mostly like benevolent neglect. I think we can hope for Nvidia to just not mess up a good thing, for them to understand that this open model open ai universe hinges upon Hugging Face, and for them to pretty please keep caring about the existential risk of the hyper-ai'ers all building their own properietary models on proprietary hardware and leaving Nvidia behind some day, and HF being the hedge against being left behind.
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.