A roughly $100 million offer to invest in the machine learning startup's model hub ignited a race among tech giants to secure the asset. Nvidia eventually acquired Hugging Face for $13 billion after the initial negotiations with OpenAI collapsed, granting the chipmaker control over the industry's most prominent repository for open source AI models.

AMD and Salesforce also entered discussions regarding a potential stake or buyout of the company, according to sources cited by CNBC. The early interest from OpenAI acted as a catalyst for these competing bids, which transitioned the company from an investment target to a full acquisition target for Nvidia.