MARKETS

Nvidia eyes Hugging Face in full-stack AI push

Nvidia may be taking one step closer to dominating the open-source AI ecosystem. 

The tech giant has agreed to buy Hugging Face, the dominant repository of open-source AI models, for $12.9 billion, according to a report by The Information, citing a source familiar with the agreement. This is a strategic move that allows Nvidia to diversify its portfolio from just chipsets and take ownership of more of the AI stack.

This would give Nvidia ownership over the "front door for open AI innovation," Ashish Nadkarni, Group VP of enterprise infrastructure at IDC, told The Deep View. "Owning that front door gives NVIDIA a major position in the mindshare of today's AI development personas."

The deal comes as Nvidia faces mounting pressure from the very labs that rely on its chips. Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic are each moving toward custom or co-designed AI silicon, a shift that threatens Nvidia's near-monopoly on AI hardware. Worse for Nvidia, these labs bring something it can't easily replicate: deep, firsthand knowledge of the models the chips are meant to run, letting them tune hardware for performance in ways a general-purpose chipmaker can't match. 

Hugging Face could eventually become a non-chip source of revenue for Nvidia, which could spur more growth if chip revenue eventually stops skyrocketing. A small caveat, however, is that, according to the report, Hugging Face has only generated  $150 million in annualized revenue thus far. That makes Nvidia's payment about 80 times the startup's forward revenue, the report notes. 

Revenue aside, the advantage of being both a model and chip maker is a key reason Nvidia has invested heavily in open-source models. Nvidia's commitment has been reflected not only in signing an open letter supporting the ecosystem, but also in internal investment in and development of open-source models, such as its Nemotron models. Of course, the Hugging Face acquisition moves that forward.

Additionally, there's a significant robotics angle: Nvidia already has a strong position with its Jetson, Isaac, and Omniverse solutions, and Hugging Face's own robotics efforts give Nvidia another point of leverage as physical AI becomes the next frontier. And just today, Hugging Face unveiled Microduck, a $399 open-source robot that learns new tricks via reinforcement learning. Even its looks resemble the Nvidia "Blue" research robot, inspired by Star Wars' BD-1, shown at demos, live events, and Disney. 

Still, as Nadkarni highlights, the acquisition would also mean there would be less choice in the industry. 

"To the extent that others like Intel, Apple, and AMD make similar plays, there will be fewer “ecosystem-neutral” platforms in the market," said Nadkarni. "Note how Microsoft has gradually made GitHub more like an extension of its own strategy (and for its own benefit)."

This is a landmark move for Nvidia, as it solidifies its efforts to be not just a chip company, but one that aims to own multiple layers of the AI stack at once. Hugging Face has become something like the GitHub of AI: serving as the industry's central hub for sharing models, datasets, and applications. Owning that layer, on top of the hardware layer Nvidia already dominates, deepens the moat. Already, nearly every open model runs on Nvidia GPUs, and buying the platform where those models live removes any ambiguity. It's also a defensive play: as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Amazon push to build their own custom chips, controlling the distribution layer keeps developers tied to Nvidia's ecosystem regardless of who's building the silicon.

TOGETHER WITH DESCOPE

Run your auth with AI agents

Coding agents are here to stay, but vibe-coding auth is dangerous business. Connect your AI agents to the Descope MCP server instead! 

This remote MCP server gives agents the ability to read documentation, manage users and tenants, configure authentication flows, generate FGA schemas, review audit logs, and more…all through natural language. 

Get started on Claude or ChatGPT.

GOVERNANCE

Can new AI coalition prevent cybersecurity crisis?

The AI industry is sounding the alarm on a problem that it helped create. 

On Thursday, a coalition of more than 100 tech companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft and more, published a letter calling for collective action to strengthen cyber defenses as AI-enabled cyberattacks pose a growing threat. 

"Today’s AI advances are already giving defenders new ways to fix weaknesses that have accumulated for years," said the letter, which was published on OpenAI's blog. "If we act decisively, we can use the defenders’ window to make our digital world much more secure."

The letter recommends three broad principles for immediate defense: recognizing that the status quo isn't good enough, empowering cyber defenders with AI, and mobilizing a global collective response. 

It also includes a list of suggestions across enterprises, governments and cybersecurity firms to protect against risk:

• All organizations should make cyber defense an "immediate leadership priority" by fixing high-risk weaknesses and raising security standards and meeting them with "urgency and coordination of an incident that takes precedence over everything except critical business operations." 

• Cybersecurity and tech companies should help lead the charge to defend against AI-enabled attacks and use AI to strengthen existing methods of defense. 

• Governments should coordinate defense at the local, national, and international levels, strengthen existing government defenses, fund response programs, and expedite the expansion of trusted access programs. 

• Meanwhile, frontier AI companies should provide responsible model access, as well as "significant funding, training, and hands-on support" for infrastructure defenders. Additionally, they should build more observability tools to keep their models and agents traceable and accountable. 

The letter comes as frontier AI companies continue to grapple with the capabilities of their most powerful models, especially as these models prove their power through incidents such as OpenAI's breach of Hugging Face. These models have grown so powerful that OpenAI has even opted to slow down development of its next-gen model, Astra, announcing earlier this month that it put its largest planned frontier reinforcement learning run "on hold" as it conducts smaller evaluations to test model behavior.

OpenAI President Greg Brockman addressed the shrinking window for cyberdefense, calling the breach of Hugging Face a "watershed moment for cybersecurity" in a recent essay. "I’ve spoken with many organizations over the past few weeks, and one theme is clear: they know they need to fundamentally uplevel their cybersecurity practices with unprecedented speed," he wrote.

This letter finally says the quiet part out loud: no enterprise, AI lab, tech giant or government is fundamentally ready for the cybersecurity shift that frontier AI capabilities are forcing upon us. However, as it stands, the solution may have to be more than playing catch-up in defense. While AI gives defenders more capabilities, threat actors tend to have a 12-foot ladder for every 10-foot wall. OpenAI did a commendable thing in tugging the reins on Astra, even if it's only temporary. It's still an open question whether other labs will follow its lead and slow the development of their next models to allow cyber defense solutions to catch up.

TOGETHER WITH JUMPCLOUD

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MARKETS

The economics pushing AI toward open models

AI's next power shift isn't gonna happen in a data center. 

In this episode of The Deep View Conversations, we sat down with Jeff Morgan, co-founder and CEO of Ollama, to explore why open models are gaining momentum, and why enterprises and developers increasingly want more control over their AI.

Morgan explains how Ollama grew from a two-week experiment into software used across 80% of the Fortune 500, how the economics of coding agents are pushing teams toward open models, and why cost, privacy and control are becoming decisive advantages. He also breaks down the hardware shift bringing data-center-class AI workloads to Apple silicon, Nvidia DGX Spark and systems powered by AMD, Intel and Qualcomm.

The conversation also covers:

• How the team behind Docker Desktop came to build Ollama
• Why open models could soon process the majority of enterprise AI tokens
• The role of harnesses, tool calling, routing and subagents
• How Ollama fits into the open-source AI stack and where its business model comes in
• Why new US and European open-model labs are emerging
• Why companies may need to own and customize their intelligence layer

If you’re interested in open models, coding agents, enterprise AI or the shift from cloud-only AI to powerful local systems, this conversation offers a clear look at where the ecosystem is heading.

📺 Watch on YouTube

🎧 Listen in your favorite podcast player

Subscribe to Deep View Conversations for interviews with the leaders shaping the future of AI, business, and technology: tdv.transitor.fm 

And don't forget to sign up for The Deep View daily newsletter. We don’t just cover AI, we decode it. In a world flooded with hype, we deliver sharp, no-nonsense insights to keep you ahead of the curve and help you put AI to work every day: subscribe.thedeepview.com

LINKS

• OpenAI to show ads on ChatGPT Free and Go tiers in India

• Plaud Inc. unveils 4G earbuds with on-the-go AI recording

• Meta internally projected spending up to $10 billion annually on Anthropic

• OpenAI published full technical report on the Hugging Face incident

• Cisco launches MyAgent AI assistant to 90,000 employees

• Experian launches credit card marketplace app within ChatGPT

• Claude: now has its own built-in browser in Cowork

• MiniMax H3 Max: new post-trained video model by fal Research

• Google Antigravity: new Interactive Generative UI Artifacts; sometimes markdown, images, and Mermaid diagrams aren't enough for the agent to fully express an idea

• ChatGPT scheduled tasks: Updates came to the feature in ChatGPT Work on web and mobile

• Gemini Omni 1.1 Flash: a new suite of creative controls and generative video capabilities to support developers

• ROIAI One: Founding Member of Technical Staff

• Code Red Partner: Artificial Intelligence Engineer

• AXION: ML Researcher

• Ivo: AI Researcher

GAMES

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