NVIDIA To Buy Hugging Face For $12.9 Billion

Nvidia has agreed to buy AI startup Hugging Face for roughly $12.93 billion, putting the world's most important open-model hub under the same roof as the most dominant AI chip company on the planet, according to The Wall Street Journal. 

CEO Jensen Huang announced the deal on Thursday, a day after NVIDIA filed that it had signed a definitive agreement. The transaction includes about $11.9 billion for Hugging Face stockholders and an equity retention package of up to $1 billion for employees who join NVIDIA. Closing is expected in the first half of 2027, pending regulatory approvals.

Huang said NVIDIA will “scale Hugging Face’s platform, strengthen its infrastructure and expand access to AI for developers and institutions worldwide.” Hugging Face, he added, “will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem,” and NVIDIA compute will not be required to build or deploy on it.

Hugging Face - where people can find, publish, fine-tune, and deploy open-weight models, has over 18 million developers, researchers, and creators who have shared over 3 million models, 500,000 datasets, and one million applications. Over 200,000 companies use the platform to discover, evaluate, customize, and deploy AI, according to AIM. 

Founded in 2016 in New York by French co-founders Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf, it last raised a $235 million Series D in 2023 at a $4.5 billion valuation. NVIDIA was already an investor, alongside Google, Amazon, Salesforce, AMD, Intel, IBM, and Qualcomm.

Why NVIDIA wanted it

The deal is about the distribution layer. NVIDIA already sells the GPUs most labs use to train and run models. Hugging Face is where those models live, get versioned, and get downloaded. Whoever owns that junction influences which models get used and, downstream, which hardware they run on.

That matters more as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and others design their own accelerators to reduce reliance on NVIDIA. Open models still need someone else’s chips. Hugging Face is where a large share of that demand originates.

Hugging Face had previously kept NVIDIA at arm’s length. Late last year it rejected a $500 million NVIDIA investment that would have valued the company at $7 billion, saying it did not want a single dominant investor that could sway decisions. Delangue has argued that concentration of power is the biggest risk in AI. This time he framed NVIDIA as a partner that would keep the platform “open, independent and compute-agnostic,” with a goal of making open source “the default way to build AI” and empowering “100 million AI builders to own their intelligence rather than rent it.”