Nvidia has acquired artificial intelligence platform Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, confirming weeks of speculation over a potential deal.

The acquisition brings Hugging Face’s extensive AI ecosystem under Nvidia, including three million models, one million applications and 500,000 datasets used by more than 18 million developers worldwide.

In a blog post announcing the deal, Nvidia Chief Executive Officer, Jensen Huang, said Hugging Face would continue to support open-source and open-weight AI models following the acquisition.

Huang added that the company would also focus on expanding access to its platform for developers as Nvidia seeks to deepen its presence across the rapidly growing AI ecosystem.

“Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem. 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,” said Huang.

Huang highlighted Nvidia’s contribution to the Hugging Face ecosystem, noting that the chipmaker has released more than 500 models and 250 open datasets on the platform. He said Nvidia develops open models to encourage developers around the world to adopt and build on them.

For Nvidia, which dominates the hardware market for AI development and inference, maintaining an open ecosystem it can influence could help create software and tools optimised for its chips.

The arrangement could also allow Nvidia to package its unused computing capacity with Hugging Face’s services and offer it to enterprise customers.

Founded in 2016, Hugging Face has raised more than $395 million in funding to date, according to Crunchbase.

The acquisition further strengthens Nvidia’s position in AI software and developer tools, complementing its dominant position in the market for AI computing hardware.