According to sources familiar with the matter, OpenAI had planned to invest $100 million in the startup Hugging Face before NVIDIA agreed this month to acquire the open-source platform for approximately $13 billion. As part of the potential deal, Hugging Face would have become a distribution channel for OpenAI's custom chips (codenamed Jalapeño), which are manufactured in collaboration with Broadcom. However, the negotiations broke down in the early stages. Subsequently, NVIDIA stepped in and completed the acquisition of Hugging Face, marking NVIDIA's second-largest acquisition in history, following its $20 billion purchase of assets from AI chip startup Groq in December.
