Nvidia has agreed to buy Hugging Face, a company known for its GitHub-like repository of open-source AI models, for $12.9 billion, according to a person with knowledge of the agreement.

The move will put Nvidia in charge of a strategic asset in the race among open-source model developers to catch up to closed-source AI models from Anthropic and OpenAI. Nvidia leaders believe that a plethora of successful open models will help preserve its AI hardware dominance because they will be a counterweight to the closed-source AI developers, each of which is trying to develop competing AI server chips and lessen their reliance on Nvidia’s.