Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf launched the AI company Hugging Face in 2016. Now, a decade later, that venture has reached a deal to be acquired by computer chip powerhouse Nvidia—and the price tag on the sale, $12.93 billion, almost certainly exceeds what the trio first thought possible.

Nvidia is buying artificial intelligence software platform Hugging Face for $12.93 billion. Jensen Huang said in a post on Thursday that more than 18 million developers, researchers and creators use Hugging Face to share more than 3 million models,

Nvidia will buy popular developer platform Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, using its growing AI war chest to expand its influence in the booming market for open-source models that can nearly match the best from OpenAI and Anthropic at lower costs.

Nvidia co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang is making a big new bet on an open-source AI future. On Thursday, Huang announced that Nvidia, a major supplier of hardware to power AI applications, reached a deal to acquire Hugging Face - which operates a platform for building AI open-source models - for $12.