00:00We've known about, Ian, the number of $12.9 billion. That's the kind of acquisition,
00:04and we've known that it's closed. This $14 billion figure, what does that include? What's
00:10the new bit here? Yeah, I mean, according to our reporting, that includes an extra sort of
00:14billion dollars of retention. Obviously, NVIDIA doesn't want the talent, the core of that company
00:20to just disappear overnight when it acquires it. That's about keeping the staff. Rachel,
00:25it seems a strange place to go next, but what is Hugging Face? We've been talking about them so
00:30often of late because they were subject to a mistaken hack by OpenAI Models, as one example.
00:37But what is it that they actually do? Yeah, so Hugging Face does a couple
00:41different things. It offers a platform that a lot of companies use to showcase AI models
00:48that they're releasing. It's also a place where anybody could post AI models or similar kinds
00:55of work that they're working on that they want to share with other people. And the company also,
00:59for a long time, has really focused on doing its own research. It's very focused on open research,
01:05open models, and has been fostering that sort of ecosystem for a long time.
01:11Ian, why would NVIDIA want to buy Hugging Face, as Rachel's just described it?
01:16What she said was key there, which is open models, right? At the moment, the industry is very
01:22concentrated on the hyperscalers and what they produce, on what OpenAI does. And what NVIDIA
01:29really wants is a broad adoption of AI across the economy. It basically wants more customers.
01:35And Hugging Face is an area where it's sort of a bazaar where things can be propagated,
01:41where people can come and get what they need. And in theory, according to probably NVIDIA,
01:45a better thing for the overall industry. Rachel, is it a surprise that this is happening? Like,
01:53in Hugging Face's history of either raising money or what we know about their co-founders
01:58selling to NVIDIA? Did we have that on the bingo card?
02:03I think it sounds a little bit surprising on its face. But then if you think about it,
02:08it actually could make a lot of sense. The company has been around for about 10 years.
02:13They have a lot of investors, including NVIDIA. My understanding from people that I've spoken to
02:19that are close to the company say that NVIDIA has been long been a dedicated investor of the company.
02:25And as Ian mentioned, they're aligned, especially on the open model. So it could be a really great
02:32matchup for both sides. A bit of M&A history for NVIDIA. And, you know, we say $14 billion would
02:40be
02:40like their biggest acquisition in AI. Where has NVIDIA done actual acquisitions as opposed to like
02:46these investments, which it makes many of? Yeah, I mean, it doesn't have a huge record of
02:52acquiring. It tends to like to do things in-house. You could probably, the most recent one of note was
02:58what it did in terms of getting hold of the assets of Grok. That's right. Grok with a Q.
03:03That's right. Grok with a Q, the AI chip investor. But really, the question here is what happens to
03:08hugging face if NVIDIA owns it? NVIDIA is a very powerful force in AI. Arguably, hugging face's
03:16greatest value is that everybody uses it. Right. Rachel, real quick, is this imminent? Do we know
03:22if this will happen, when it will happen? Yeah, according to our reporting, it sounds like it is
03:28pretty imminent. And we are expecting that it will happen this week.
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