Nvidia got rich selling scarcity in artificial intelligence. Now it’s betting on AI abundance.

Nvidia (NVDA) is buying Hugging Face for about $13 billion, putting the dominant AI-chip company in control of a platform whose value comes partly from helping developers use models and hardware built by everyone else.

Nvidia is already positioning itself to make money even when customers build competing chips. Hugging Face pushes that idea one step further. Nvidia isn’t just trying to capture more of each AI factory. It wants more factories to feed.

Hugging Face is essentially a GitHub-like center for AI models, where developers can find, download, adapt, and deploy models instead of building everything from scratch.

“We have 18 million AI builders using the Hugging Face platform today, and our goal is to get to 100 million AI builders in the next few years,” Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue said on a Thursday press call announcing the deal.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) CEO Antonio Neri told Yahoo Finance on Thursday that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has moved from GPUs into networking and software, and “now he’s going to the developer layer.”

Nvidia’s bet rests on a 160-year-old economic idea.

Economist William Stanley Jevons noticed that more efficient steam engines didn’t make Britain burn less coal. They made coal-powered work cheaper, encouraging so much more use that total coal consumption rose. The idea became known as the Jevons paradox.

AI may be running the same experiment in fast-forward.

OpenRouter temporarily discounted two OpenAI models and watched token usage — the basic units AI models process and produce — surge, while a third model kept at full price during the experiment barely moved.

That is the bet behind Hugging Face. If open, cheaper models make AI easier to use, total demand for computing can rise even as the cost of each task falls.

It also turns Hugging Face’s neutrality from an awkward condition of the deal into part of the strategy. The more models, developers, clouds, and hardware choices the platform supports, the more AI gets used — and the more opportunities Nvidia has to supply the computing behind it.

As of Friday afternoon, Nvidia had not answered Yahoo Finance questions about what would prevent its own technology from getting preferential treatment on Hugging Face, or what access it could have to customers’ private models and how they use the platform.

And the next wave of users may not even be human. Hugging Face says AI agents — software that can search for, choose, and use models on its own — are becoming users of the platform too.