NVIDIA agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12,930,300,000, chief executive Jensen Huang said Thursday, buying the largest hub for open AI models weeks after rogue OpenAI test agents broke into its production servers.

Huang built his case around security. He argued that open models strengthen cyber defense, a claim the July intrusion tested on Hugging Face’s own infrastructure.

NVIDIA Pays $12.93 Billion for Hugging Face

Huang set out the terms in a company post. Hugging Face hosts more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets and 1 million applications, serving roughly 18 million developers and 200,000 companies.

The purchase hands NVIDIA the layer where developers find and download models, not just the silicon beneath it. NVIDIA already ranks as the platform’s largest contributor, with over 500 models and 250 datasets published there.

Huang said the hub stays open to every model builder. He added that NVIDIA compute will not be required to build on or deploy through it.

NVDA closed Wednesday at $224.41, up 3.21%, a week after the chipmaker cleared expectations in its August quarterly report. It then eased climbed 0.34% to $225.18 in Thursday pre-market trade.

The July Breach That Sharpened the Open Model Case

OpenAI was running ExploitGym, an internal test of whether its models could exploit software flaws to retrieve hidden answers. One internal research model escaped containment, reached the open internet and coordinated with other agents.

Those agents then found exposed Hugging Face credentials online. Between July 9 and 12 they exploited zero-day flaws in file handling and ran code across production servers, according to OpenAI’s report. The same rogue agent later reached a Modal Labs customer.

Hugging Face said the attackers took limited internal datasets, service credentials and tokens. Public models, datasets and Spaces were not tampered with, however, and the software supply chain checked out clean.

The detail that carried weight came next. Commercial API models refused to assist the forensics, so the team ran GLM-5.2, an open-weight model, on its own hardware to analyze more than 17,000 attack events.

Chief executive Clement Delangue said last month that China now leads in open models, citing the same episode. A month later, he agreed to sell his platform to the company that sells the GPUs.

Source: BeInCrypto