In the field of artificial intelligence, Nvidia's investments are often seen as the "ticket to success." However, Hugging Face, the open-source giant known as the "GitHub of AI," recently made a shocking decision: officially rejecting an investment offer of $500 million (approximately 3.6 billion Chinese yuan) from Nvidia.
As the most active open-source AI model library in the world today, Hugging Face's decision was not due to "not needing money." In 2023, Nvidia had already joined forces with other tech giants such as Google and Amazon to invest 235 million dollars in its Series D round, raising its valuation to 4.5 billion dollars. This time, Nvidia attempted to deepen cooperation by offering a single investment of 500 million dollars, but it was ultimately rejected by the startup company at the last moment.
According to reports, the core concern of Hugging Face's founding team is "neutrality." As a cornerstone of the open-source community, Hugging Face's mission is to make machine learning technology easily accessible to everyone. Its platform currently hosts over one million models and datasets. If it became overly deeply tied to Nvidia, it might damage its neutral position between AMD, Intel, and other computing chip manufacturers. To maintain the purity of the open-source ecosystem, they chose to turn down this large sum of money, which might carry a "exclusive" connotation.
Currently, the competition for AI chips has entered a fierce stage. Hugging Face's choice undoubtedly injected a strong stimulus into the open-source community, proving that even amid the waves of technological monopolies and capital expansion, there are still platforms willing to uphold the principles of "openness and fairness." This move has also sparked widespread discussions in the industry about the neutrality of AI computing power.
Key Points:
🚫 Hugging Face refused a $500 million investment from Nvidia, aiming to maintain its neutral identity as the world's largest open-source AI community.
⚖️ Concerned that being deeply tied to a single chip giant might alienate other partners like AMD and Intel, thus disrupting the balance of the open-source ecosystem.
💎 The company has previously received support from multiple tech giants, and its valuation remains stable. It continues to prioritize "open collaboration" over "capital dependence" as its core development principle.
