I guess we may have to start paying to download models.
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.
They have various paid services that relate to AI—paid inference hosting; paid accounts aimed at AI development with GPU rentals [credits plus paid overages, I believe], more private storage and public storage than free accounts; and many of the community a and some other benefits on individual/team/enterprise tiers; additional paid storage above the base quotas for the paid account tiers; on demand rentals of HF managed containers on GCP and AWS, and some other things.
They don't need a business model to have value here.
They sell a few cloud services, but the most valuable thing in their portfolio is live, engaged accounts from pretty much every person directly interested in running AI models.
If you were an org positioned to do sell better cloud services on a wildly better margin, wanted to promote consumer-binned AI hardware from your manufacturing chain, or wanted to promote new AI enterprise or research-support initiatives, those accounts would seem to be an absurdly fantastic collection of warm leads that you could gradually mine and upsell (and critically: that your competitors could no longer buy/use themselves).
The story is in an intermediate state right now, but as semiquaver points out, The Information is reporting it as fact. Since their reporting tends to be as reliable as it is hardwalled, we went with their claim in the title.
Please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.
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.
I thin HF holds huge power in how they’ve consolidated all the open models and data, but monopoly feels like a stretch here. They are in reality a fairly small startup with lots of alternatives (all of which are much worse at this point granted) and are mostly a loss leading part of the open source ecosystem. I think it would be very hard to make a case against this on monopoly grounds, though I wouldn’t be opposed to someone trying if they thought it was possible.
Vertically integrated monopolies naturally have aligned in incentives for themselves, which allows more capture which turns out bad for customers. Whether it is a monopoly is an open question.
This isn't vertical integration. This is a commoditize your complements play and that does benefit customers. Nvidia benefits from supporting the open model ecosystem, if models are a commodity the gpus become what's scarce.
Someone with financial / decision making weight their is going to ask why they are commoditizing models that run on "others" GPUs .... Since doing that makes their gpus less of the scarce resource..
Oh, I totally agree, this alone is not vertical integration, but can be a path too it, long term being able to vertically integrate undercutting others that would be on top of the chain then retracting the open model.
>Vertically integrated monopolies naturally have aligned in incentives for themselves, which allows more capture which turns out bad for customers.
Apple's devices have resulted in a great increase in quality of life for myself and family members who used to waste a lot of time with Windows drivers/BSODs/random updates/malware/etc.
It's been almost 20 years, and it's turned out OK.
Keep alive the on-prem hardware sales? Not as big part likely but still something good to have. On-prem hardware needs models to be available to be useful. So pushing those could sell more on-prem hardware.
I'm puzzled by the reactions. This is not a good thing. Yes, they're releasing more open source code and models, but they do it BECAUSE OF pressure from the community and other open source projects.
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.
Potentially horrible for monopoly reasons, but if other big acquisitions in the AI era teach us anything, developers are about to get a whole lot of free and discounted trial credits.
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.
Current US government is pay to play. As in buy my cryptocurrency and you get a pardon or case dismissal, no backroom deal required. Payment directly. Blatant corruption sucks.
If the House or Senate turn that might actually stop or slow down. The market falling by 30% when the AI bubble eventually pops would also trigger it.
Why would China want to crash the AI industry? Their goal is not to damage the United States, necessarily. Their goal is to have the best domestic AI on the planet. They intend to do that through the way that they dominate every other industry: good enough quality at a much greater scale.
Surely crashing the Ai industry (in terms of reducing commercial revenue) makes it harder for the leaders to keep raising money and so keep investing in r&d to the same levels. Thus allowing competitors without access to latest American hardware to keep up.
True, but better nvidia than any other big tech contender. Nvidia has a very strong business incentive to make huggingface thrive, whereas pretty much everyone else has the opposite incentive.
I think this is good.. They have incentives to keep things free to keep people using their GPUs. I think that's one of the least enshittifying outcomes possible
The Government plans to regulate open source ai. Nvidea is dependent on the Government to back loans, provide property, and make laws in their favor. Now they have ownership of what the Government wants to control. A perfect wedge they can use to get more from the Government.
The unlimited private repos for free tier would have happened anyways. You have to remember that this was around the time people were jumping ship from GitHub exactly because they didn't offer private repos for free. It was something many wanted, and they were actively seeking out other places that would give it to them.
I'm not convinced that's the case. GitHub was like that forever, they were well established and the change happened not long after Microsoft bought them. There was no global shift to gitlab instances or Atlassian as far as I am aware.
You can dislike an entity or an action and still acknowledge it also had some positive effects.
I only ever used GitHub for private (and a few public) repos, so for me personally it got significantly better, being able to have private repos for free.
Pretty bad tradeoff of course, improving the situation for non paying people while making it bad for paying customers.
The fit is theoretically good (nvidia is model agnostic) but I can see then pushing the ecosystem increasingly towards cuda and some custom nvidia software packages for inference etc etc
I'm sure it'll be fine. As long as you have the latest 90-class card you'll probably continue have nearly full functionality from the HF libraries. (Upgrade to enterprise gear for full functionality)
I'm not a fan of big-tech acquisition results either, but one benefit can be that a product continues to exist when it would otherwise become insolvent.
The open weights AI ecosystem is way too concentrated with HF. That said, it was clear they were going to either get bought or aggressively monetized at some point, Nvidia seems like it could be one of the more aligned acquirers.
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.
It's already part of Alibaba, which has its own incentives. So does kaggle with Google. Civitai is neutral but it is mostly nsfw even though they don't show it outright. Torrenting is the Best way
The $13b doesn't go to hugging face's bank acct to pay for anything like S3 egress fees... It go to hugging face's owners' Bank accounts for them to do anything else. New cohorts of billionaires and centi millionaires getting minted.
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[ 0.18 ms ] story [ 56.4 ms ] threadOr 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.
They sell a few cloud services, but the most valuable thing in their portfolio is live, engaged accounts from pretty much every person directly interested in running AI models.
If you were an org positioned to do sell better cloud services on a wildly better margin, wanted to promote consumer-binned AI hardware from your manufacturing chain, or wanted to promote new AI enterprise or research-support initiatives, those accounts would seem to be an absurdly fantastic collection of warm leads that you could gradually mine and upsell (and critically: that your competitors could no longer buy/use themselves).
> We make money via compute credits + Enterprise Hub + HF Pro subs [...]
I guess this plus custom inference deployments, external inference providers...
[1] https://x.com/reach_vb/status/1928050126498713706
While ATI and Nvidia never tried to implement a Glide emulation layer, several hobbyists did and 3dfx shut them down with legal threats
Were there any legal barriers to ATI/AMD or Intel implementing CUDA or PhysX on their systems?
No gamer had a problem with nvidia.
Many bought their mobos and video cards.
Mac was pretty hated, Steam was very hated, we didn’t bow to any software company.
Nvidia actually made hardware.
Your propaganda is so awful because it’s always obvious you have no experience
Everything I can find online is referring to this one source. That doesn't tell me if it's happening or not.
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.
Apple's devices have resulted in a great increase in quality of life for myself and family members who used to waste a lot of time with Windows drivers/BSODs/random updates/malware/etc.
It's been almost 20 years, and it's turned out OK.
works fine for now
whats nvidia gonna do except make it worse?
usually buyouts go something like this:
1 buy company
2 fire various people
3 enshittify
hugging face even said they didnt want to accept a 500 million dollar investment from nvidia, because they didnt want nvidia to run the ship.
instead they sell it... guess who'll run the ship?
https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/24/hugging-face-reportedly-in...
Nvidia is making tons of money by selling GPUs at a very high profit margin. They will do anything to remain dominant
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.
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).
That is what will happen to torrents. Followed by VPNs. China, Russia and Iran had paved the way already.
Can't you see the puzzle coming toghether?
Have been for a long time. All of the big techs should have been broken up long ago.
If the House or Senate turn that might actually stop or slow down. The market falling by 30% when the AI bubble eventually pops would also trigger it.
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.
You can dislike an entity or an action and still acknowledge it also had some positive effects.
Pretty bad tradeoff of course, improving the situation for non paying people while making it bad for paying customers.
I'm not a fan of big-tech acquisition results either, but one benefit can be that a product continues to exist when it would otherwise become insolvent.
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.
I hope nvidia does right by the community.
I think you mean hecto-millionaires.