STRENGTHENING NVIDIA’S DOMINANCE
Instead, buying Hugging Face would give Nvidia a new strategic position in AI and greater influence over developers, thanks to the platform’s links to millions of coders at the point where they download and deploy models. That could rev up Nvidia’s cloud ambitions, giving it another way to rent computing power to AI makers.
But there’s a bigger irony here. Some supporters of Hugging Face, which now has hubs in both Paris and New York, have been celebrating the reported sale as a win for European tech.
But it would also represent a sellout, not just for startups in Europe, which frequently capitulate to larger Silicon Valley buyers before they get a chance to build their own empires, but also for the open-source AI movement itself.
For all of Hugging Face’s efforts to make AI less centralised, it may now help Nvidia protect its dominance. The potential acquirer controls an estimated 70 to 90 per cent of AI chip sales, a market that Google has struggled to dent with its own processors.
And Hugging Face’s famous neutrality will come into question if it provides the world’s dominant chipmaker with a new route to persuading developers to choose its hardware for their models.
However many makers of chatbot technology there may be, the infrastructure underpinning those services is still primarily controlled by one company. And one of the world’s biggest advocates for decentralising AI power is about to hand Nvidia even more of it.
