United Kingdom, Sept. 4 -- Nvidia has agreed to buy artificial intelligence platform Hugging Face for about $12.9bn (£9.5bn), in one of the chipmaker's biggest acquisitions as it expands beyond hardware and deeper into AI software.

Hugging Face, founded in 2016, has become a major online hub where developers and researchers can find, share and test AI models and tools.

The platform is used by more than 18 million developers and hosts more than three million AI models, while more than 200,000 companies use its services, according to the companies.

The acquisition would give Nvidia control of a leading open-source AI platform, where models can be downloaded and adapted rather than being controlled entirely by a single company.

Nvid...