As Nvidia Corp. announced this morning that it has agreed to acquire Hugging Face Inc. for $12.93 billion — one of the largest acquisitions in the company’s history — Chief Executive Jensen Huang promised that the platform will retain its brand, its leadership and, according to both companies, its neutrality. “Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem,” Huang said. “Nvidia compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face.”
Nvidia Corp. delivered another mind-boggling quarter Wednesday. Total revenue reached $96 billion, up more than 100% year over year, with data center revenue at $89 billion and a third-quarter guide of $108 billion. More striking than the quarterly numbers was the guidance Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress dropped midway through the call: Fiscal 2028 revenue should grow roughly 70% — and that is a supply-constrained figure. Customer forecasts, she said, “point to our growth doubling next year.”
For the past two years, the generative artificial intelligence boom has largely been defined by a single market. Hyperscalers have dominated the market with massive capital spending. According to CreditSights, the five largest U.S. hyperscalers — Amazon Web Services Inc., Microsoft Corp., Google LLC, Meta Platforms Inc. and Oracle Corp. — are on pace to spend roughly $700 billion to $800 billion in capital expenditures this year, with about three-quarters of that spending tied directly to AI infrastructure.
Physical artificial intelligence is emerging as the next major phase of AI. These systems not only generate content or analyze data but also perceive, reason about and act in the physical world. The opportunity is massive, but so are the operational, data, latency and lifecycle-management challenges. That is why Amazon Web Services Inc. last month rolled out cloud-to-edge solutions for customers building these systems.
Fortinet Inc. announced its intent to acquire Virtue AI Inc. Monday, and though the financial aspects are interesting, what’s more significant is how this will help businesses with their next big security challenge: How do you secure agentic artificial intelligence? Generative AI has raised new concerns about data leakage, unsanctioned use and inaccurate outputs.