Nvidia has agreed to buy AI model platform Hugging Face for $13 billion, in the latest step by the $5.4 trillion chip giant to use its financial might to accelerate the technology’s boom while exerting greater control over the industry.

Hugging Face, which only last year turned down a large investment from Nvidia at a $7 billion valuation to maintain its independence, serves as a repository for millions of models and data sets and has become a champion of “open” AI systems.

Nvidia said the goal of the deal was to speed up the spread of open models. Unlike proprietary models from labs such as OpenAI and Anthropic, the design of open-weight models is public and users can download, customize and run them on their own hardware.

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Nvidia is reportedly moving forward to acquire Hugging Face for $12.9 billion. The acquisition could help the hardware giant expand and fortify its deep integration with the wider AI industry.

Among other things, Hugging Face is a cloud repository for AI models, similar in some respects to what GitHub is for conventional computer software. Developers and researchers search for models that meet certain criteria, download and run them, and fine-tune them into different variants that then get uploaded back up to Hugging Face.

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Taiwan has indicted nine people—reportedly including an Nvidia senior manager and two Supermicro employees based in the country—who allegedly helped forge documents to cover up illegal exports of high-end AI servers to China in violation of US export controls.

On Monday, Reuters reported that prosecutors in Keelung did not release any names but confirmed that the suspects were “charged with breach of trust and document forgery.” One suspect linked to a related case remains at large, accused of the “siphoning of funds from a distributor company involved” in helping China get access to restricted Nvidia chips.

Since 2022, the US has required a license to export semiconductors to China, with the intent of protecting national security by staying ahead of China in the AI race. But after the US arrested Supermicro co-founder Wally Liaw in March for allegedly funneling $2.5 billion in restricted AI servers to China since 2024, Taiwan launched a separate probe to learn more about the scheme.

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