It’s official: the juggernaut, the biggest U.S. tech firm by market cap, is set to ingest the AI platform and community Hugging Face, where developers share, discover, download, train, and deploy open-source models, datasets, and tools.

Nvidia announced today, in a piece ostensibly authored by head honcho Jensen Huang , that the firm will buy Hugging Face for around $12.9 billion. To which some might ask: why?

The general idea seems to be that by owning the platform, Nvidia can make Hugging Face more sympatico with its own hardware and ecosystems. It’s important to note that Nvidia is pioneering its own open source models, too. I went to reddit to hear ordinary humans express this in their own words.

“The real value is the distribution and community moat,” writes Budget-News1107 . “(Hugging Face is) the default hub for hosting, evaluating, and discovering models, and that position is nearly impossible to replicate even with infinite compute. Nvidia buying them would be less about chips and more about owning the place where the open-weight ecosystem already lives, which is honestly a terrifying thought for anyone building on HF’s infrastructure.”

“They can disadvantage non-Nvidia support such as any upcoming models that might fit on Chinese silicon, AMD, or any of the new hardware companies,” writes alrojo . “It doesn’t have to be outright, but subtleties such as slow merging or limiting support. I hope another projects like hugging face (sic) will come along to support the research community without the Nvidia influence.”

“Just like GitHub, they can build on top and offer more services,” writes justin107d . “The traffic to see which accounts are downloading what together is probably valuable customer information to optimize future chip designs or even build their own models.”

Some posters also point out that in the past, a deal for $7 billion was ultimately scuppered.

Others, though, clarify what you can find with a little bit of research, that Nvidia had offered to invest $500 million in Hugging Face at a $7 billion valuation, and that deal was not a direct buy-out.

But now it is, and it’s happening.

Nvidia insists that it will not create the kind of platform vendor lock in that competitors might be fearing.

“Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem,” writes Huang. “Developers will choose the models they want, the frameworks they want, the clouds and inference service providers they want and the computing platforms they want. NVIDIA compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face.”

Nevertheless, the theory persists that Nvidia can pursue the kinds of more subtle changes explained above by our reddit commentators.

It wasn’t too long ago that I was writing about Nvidia’s plan to make its chips investable assets, with a $500 billion investment. The company is making big moves, which is notable for a firm that is already so gargantuan. I could say a lot more about this, but I’m going to choose to instead speak through yet another redditor chiming in, who said it in what is perhaps the shortest way possible, albeit while taking a grammar shortcut.

“Nvidia is next Facebook,” write Roodut six days prior to press time.

To be clear, what this means to me is that Nvidia is gearing up to double down, then triple down, on its current position of advantage. Unwilling to rest on its laurels, it wants more.

Let’s look at the stock chart.

First of all, there’s a new cash dividend of one thin quarter, U.S., but I’m more interested in price volatility.

On the news, NVDA seems to have climbed 3-4%, to near all-time highs, where a year ago, it was worth about half of its $220s position. So even though its market cap is already close to one fifth of total U.S. GDP, it looks like it has farther to go.