US DOJ Investigates Nvidia's $12.9 Billion Acquisition of Hugging Face
The US Department of Justice is probing whether Nvidia's acquisition of AI platform Hugging Face harms competition, marking scrutiny on its second-largest deal.
According to CNBC, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) is investigating chipmaker Nvidia and has requested information on how its $12.9 billion acquisition of Hugging Face, an AI model hosting and testing platform, could impact competitors. Reuters first reported the inquiry on Wednesday, which CNBC confirmed with a person familiar with the matter.
Hugging Face runs a widely used open-source platform for hosting and testing AI models, while also selling infrastructure and collaboration tools to the tech industry. When Nvidia announced the acquisition in September, CEO Jensen Huang stated the deal would help "expand access to AI for developers and institutions worldwide." At that time, Nvidia said more than 18 million people and over 200,000 companies used Hugging Face to share at least 3 million models and 500,000 datasets.
This acquisition marks Nvidia's second-largest purchase, following its $20 billion acquisition of Groq assets late last year, which also attracted DOJ scrutiny. The closest comparable to Hugging Face's business was GitHub, acquired by Microsoft in 2018 for $7.5 billion.
Nvidia declined to comment. The investigation is currently in the preliminary information-gathering stage, with no specific legal charges or next procedural steps disclosed yet.