Nvidia announced on September 3 it will acquire Hugging Face, a popular AI developer platform, for roughly $12.93 billion [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. Hugging Face hosts over 18 million users, more than 3 million AI models, and over 1 million applications, making it one of the largest platforms for open-source AI models and datasets [3, 7, 5].
Founded in 2016 by French entrepreneurs Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf, Hugging Face provides libraries, datasets, and applications widely used across the AI research and development community [2, 3, 8, 9, 5]. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the platform will remain open to the entire AI ecosystem, with developers free to choose their models, frameworks, and hosting providers. "Nvidia compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face," Huang stated [1, 2, 3, 7, 10, 4, 9, 5, 6].
Huang added he was "honoured that Clem came to me as he considered the next chapter of Hugging Face and believed Nvidia would be a great home for the company" [8]. Co-founder Clément Delangue said their goal is to run an independently neutral platform within Nvidia, but gaining access to more compute, support, collaboration, and visibility was key to teaming with the chipmaker [3, 5].
The $12.93 billion deal includes about $11.9 billion going to Hugging Face investors and an equity retention program worth up to $1 billion to employees [1, 2, 6, 11]. The deal will help Nvidia broaden beyond hardware into open AI model ecosystems at a time when demand for open-weight AI models is surging as businesses seek alternatives to costly proprietary offerings [1, 2, 6, 11]. Some U.S. firms are also developing their own AI chips, prompting Nvidia to strengthen the open model ecosystem [1, 2, 6, 11].
Nvidia is already the largest contributor of open models and datasets on Hugging Face, releasing hundreds of these resources [7, 5]. The acquisition is also expected to give Nvidia insights and data to compete with major U.S. and Chinese AI labs [1, 2, 6, 11].
Hugging Face recently faced a security incident linked to rogue AI agents during OpenAI testing [1, 2, 8, 4]. The acquisition is expected to close in the first half of 2027 [8]. Following the deal, Hugging Face co-founders have become billionaires, with an estimated net worth of about $1.8 billion each [8].
