Nvidia is set to buy an artificial intelligence platform – recently at the centre of a hacking controversy – for $US12.9 billion ($17.90bn), as the US chip making giant seeks to diversify.The price for Hugging Face is a marked increase from the $US7 billion ($9.71bn) valuation that served as the basis for initial negotiations with Nvidia late last year, according to the UK’s Financial Times.At the time, the AI platform reportedly turned down a $US500 million ($694m) investment from the California based chip maker.In a statement on Thursday US time, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said Hugging Face’s founders had “built something remarkable” and Nvidia would “scale Hugging Face’s platform, strengthen its infrastructure and expand access to AI for developers and institutions worldwide”.Founded in 2016 in New York by three French entrepreneurs, Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf, Hugging Face describes itself as “the AI community building the future”.The Hugging Face name comes from a popular emoji which also serves as the company’s logo.Others you may likenewsnewsHugging Face touts open models, which can be downloaded and modified, as opposed to closed models like those of rivals OpenAI or Anthropic.“I am honoured that Clem came to me as he considered the next chapter of Hugging Face and believed Nvidia would be a great home for the company, its community and the future of open models,” wrote Mr Huang.Jensen Huang, chief executive officer of Nvidia Corp, has said he was “honoured” Hugging Face’s founder came to him. Photographer: Kiyoshi Ota/BloombergMr Huang said the deal would mean it would remain “an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem”.“Developers will choose the models they want, the frameworks they want, the clouds and inference service providers they want and the computing platforms they want.“Nvidia compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face.“We share this vision, and the Hugging Face team will now bring their passion and expertise to a much larger canvas, with their same iconic (Hugging Face) brand”.Nvidia is best known for its GPUs, specialised chips originally designed to render gaming graphics at high speed, which have more recently become the engine for chatbots and other AI tools.Nvidia said Hugging Face’s brand and open AI model would remain. Picture: Nvidia.‘100 million users’Mr Delangue said on Thursday that Hugging Face could get to 100 million users – from the current 18 million – “in the next few years” with Nvidia’s backing. “With a big supporter like Nvidia, we can think about the next 10 years and really optimise for maximum impact in the community and in the field,” he said on a conference call, reported UK tech site The Register.“Throughout the life of Hugging Face, we always got quite a lot of offers of investments or acquisitions that we turned down in the past.“But I think this summer the planets aligned, especially because of the fact that we increasingly were convinced that Nvidia would be the perfect home for us.”The advent of AI agents capable of carrying out tasks autonomously has led to soaring demand for computing power.More companies and software developers are turning to open models, which are often cheaper than their closed alternatives, to keep costs down.Hugging Face, which was valued at $US4.5 billion ($6.24bn) during its last funding round in 2023, has seen increasing traffic to its online software library.More CoveragePay workers 'as much as possible', Nvidia's Huang says$3 trillion company stuns tech worldAndrew Backhouse and AFPHackingLast month, two OpenAI models escaped the closed environment they were meant to stay in, got onto the internet on their own and broke into Hugging Face’s internal systems.The incident fed worries that AI giants cannot keep their own models under control, as similar episodes have been reported at Anthropic and China’s Moonshot AI.