Nvidia has agreed to acquire Hugging Face, the leading repository for open-source and open-weight AI models, in a deal worth $12.9 billion. In this episode of The Register's Kettle podcast, reporters discuss the acquisition and question whether Nvidia's promise to leave Hugging Face largely unchanged will hold, given Nvidia's dominant position in the AI hardware market and Hugging Face's central role as the go-to platform for open model development and community discussion.

The deal, first reported by Register journalist Dan Robinson, is expected to close next year subject to regulatory approval. Hugging Face, often described as "GitHub for AI", currently has around 80 million users and its CEO has set a goal of reaching 100 million developers, citing the need for greater computing and storage resources to sustain the platform's large models and datasets. The podcast hosts draw comparisons with GitHub's stability issues since being acquired by Microsoft, questioning whether Hugging Face could face similar problems as it scales, and whether the acquisition risks fragmenting the open AI development ecosystem.