India, Sept. 3 -- Nvidia has officially agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion. The deal will give the chipmaker control of the popular open-source AI platform as Nvidia expands beyond making chips and moves further into the wider AI industry.

Hugging Face will remain an open platform after the acquisition. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the platform will continue to serve the entire AI ecosystem rather than becoming a platform only for Nvidia products, according to a blog post by Huang on Thursday.

Nvidia wants to expand Hugging Face's platform and infrastructure. Huang said the deal will help strengthen the platform and give developers and institutions around the world greater access to AI, according to his blog post.

The deal ha...