Could NVIDIA's purchase of Hugging Face boost AI sovereignty in the EU?

On Thursday, American chipmaker NVIDIA announced they will buy the artificial intelligence library Hugging Face for $13 billion.

It's an astonishing amount of money for a platform that started as an age-appropriate chat app for teenagers, but has since pivoted to being one of the premier databases hosting open-source and open-weight AI models.

Though the deal is mostly taking place in the United States, the company's founders are French, have half of their employees in Paris, hoping to become a key part of the open-source AI ecosystem in Europe.

This acquisition will raise a lot of eyebrows in both Paris and Brussels, particularly among competition regulators and AI industry watchers who will want the EU AI Act enforced where necessary, and a regulatory review of the terms found in the deal.

Open vs. closed

NVIDIA is now tallied as the largest publicly traded company in the world by market cap, a position they rocketed to after the boom in demand for their GPUs in dedicated AI data centres. In the last year, the company has doubled down on its embrace of open AI models, providing dozens of models for free on its on platforms and leading policy efforts to ensure competition among both closed-source and open-source LLM providers.

For innovators in the European Union who may not have the resources or capital to train and launch their own models on the same level as Anthropic or Open AI, use of Hugging Face's platforms could end up being a valuable tool to providing solutions for Europeans.

"For many of the problems that exist in AI, open-source can be a solution," explained Hugging Face co-founder Clément Delangue in a 2024 interview with Le Monde. "Because the proprietary models are black boxes that make it difficult to analyse their bias or sources of truth."

The European approach to AI has been one of stipulating rules and policies to provide a global blueprint, some of which favor domestic industries and broader continental goals. But innovation is happening at every level of the stack, not just among European LLM makers like Mistral or DeepL that are captured by the EU AI Act.

The Dutch company ASML, for example, is the largest supplier for all global semiconductors companies, making the machines that are integral to chip production used in every processor. ElevenLabs, founded by Polish researchers, has excelled as a speech and voice processing model now integrated in thousands of AI products.

The push for sovereignty

Beyond founders and innovators, many of the open models can also be used for creating custom versions for governments and agencies, hosted locally and trained on data that may be sensitive or protected.

Vendor lock-ins are a real concern for EU regulators, as reported here, but open models could help provide real competition and reduce reliance on larger tech firms that host data outside the EU. This would call for much more expertise particularly in government agencies, but it would be a welcome sign for those who are wanting to de-risk European systems from reliance on Chinese or American infrastructure.

Of course, building EU data centers is a major goal of European regulators, but the software within those data centers will matter as well.

For people using AI every day, consumers and small companies alike, the most exciting element of open models is just how much is available to everyone to use at little or no cost. This will be a boon to researchers and practitioners in the arts and sciences who may not have the budgets of large companies.

"Open science and open source AI distribute economic gains by enabling hundreds of thousands of small companies and startups to build with AI. It fosters innovation, and fair competition between all," testified Hugging Face co-founder Clément Delangue in 2023 before a U.S. House Committee.

No matter the model used by a consumer or small company, that's a call to fork it, tune it, customise it, and upgrade it.