The Globe and Mail reports in its Friday edition that Nvidia will buy developer platform Hugging Face for $12.93-billion, using its growing artificial intelligence war chest to expand its influence in the booming market for open-source models that can nearly match the best from OpenAI and Anthropic at lower costs (all figures U.S.). A Reuters dispatch to The Globe reports that the deal, one of Nvidia's biggest, will bring the chip giant closer to the developers who use Hugging Face to find models and tools, potentially helping it create a pipeline of customers that may buy processors to run AI services. It marks the company' s latest effort to use its surging cash pile, totaling more than $22-billion at the end of July, to broaden its customer base when clients such as Meta, OpenAI and Microsoft are developing their own artificial-intelligence chips to reduce their reliance on Nvidia. The two companies already work together to help developers use Nvidia's computing services on the platform. The chip giant's increasing investments, sometimes in its own customers, have, however, sparked investor fears the $5.4-trillion company could be artificially inflating valuations and contributing to a bubble in the industry.