SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 30 -- Every time a developer pulls an artificial intelligence model from Hugging Face - the open-source hub that has become as essential to AI as GitHub is to software development - they are downloading something that may soon belong to Nvidia.

The chipmaker has agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, The Information reported late Wednesday, citing a source with knowledge of the matter. Neither company responded to requests for comment, and Fortune confirmed that no signed agreement had been reached at the time of publication. The terms of the reported deal are already reshaping how the industry thinks about where power sits. Nvidia controls an estimated 90 percent of the global market for AI training chips....