SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Shares of Nvidia Corp. climbed $5.91, or 2.59%, to $234.36 as of 9:55 a.m. ET Friday, extending a week of strong gains for the chipmaker following its confirmed acquisition of AI platform Hugging Face and continued momentum from a blowout quarterly earnings report last week.

Nvidia officially confirmed Thursday that it has agreed to acquire Hugging Face, one of the world's most widely used platforms for sharing and deploying open-source artificial intelligence models, in a deal valued at $12.93 billion. CEO Jensen Huang and Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue joined CNBC's "Squawk Box" to discuss the transaction, emphasizing the strategic importance of keeping AI development open rather than centralized around a small number of proprietary providers.

Huang told CNBC that open models "matter greatly to our company," reinforcing comments he made in the deal's official announcement, in which he pledged that Hugging Face would remain a neutral platform available to developers regardless of which computing hardware or cloud provider they choose to use.

Patrick Moorhead, an industry analyst who covers the semiconductor sector, offered his own assessment of the strategic logic behind the acquisition in remarks to CNBC.

"It's about accelerating open source growth," Moorhead said of Nvidia's rationale for acquiring Hugging Face.

Rosenblatt analysts weighed in on the deal as well, framing it within the broader context of Nvidia's expanding role across the AI industry's financial ecosystem. According to Rosenblatt, Nvidia is increasingly using its balance sheet to help maintain the overall health of the broader AI ecosystem, extending its........

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