Nvidia agrees USD $12.93 billion deal for Hugging Face
Sat, 5th Sep 2026 (Today)
Nvidia has agreed to acquire Hugging Face for USD $12.93 billion, bringing one of the largest online communities for open AI models under the control of the US chip designer.
The deal gives Nvidia ownership of a platform used by more than 18 million developers, researchers and creators. Hugging Face hosts more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets and 1 million applications, while more than 200,000 companies use the service to find, test, adapt and deploy AI tools.
The transaction also marks a significant move by Nvidia beyond chips and computing systems into a software platform at the centre of the open-model ecosystem. Hugging Face has become a widely used marketplace and collaboration hub for AI developers, particularly for organisations seeking access to models from multiple providers.
Nvidia said Hugging Face would remain an open platform for the wider AI sector, with developers still able to choose their preferred models, frameworks, cloud services, inference providers and computing platforms.
That pledge addresses a central question surrounding the acquisition: whether a platform known for model neutrality will remain independent in practice after being bought by a company whose dominance in AI computing has already drawn intense scrutiny. Nvidia said its own compute would not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face.
The platform will also continue to support open-source and open-weight models from across the industry, Nvidia said. Hugging Face will continue to support multi-cloud and multi-accelerator development and deployment, allowing users to run workloads on different kinds of hardware and infrastructure.
Open model focus
Part of the strategic logic behind the deal is Nvidia's push to position itself as a supporter of open models as well as proprietary AI systems. Nvidia said it has made multi-year investments in open-source platforms, including Hugging Face, and contributed hundreds of open models and datasets to the service.
Nvidia said it is the largest contributor of open models and data on Hugging Face, with more than 500 models and more than 250 open datasets released on the platform.
By acquiring Hugging Face outright, Nvidia gains direct control over infrastructure that many developers use to distribute, compare and adapt AI models. That could strengthen its influence not only in training and inference hardware, where it already holds a strong market position, but also in the channels through which AI tools reach developers and businesses.
Nvidia said its infrastructure, engineering resources and global reach could improve Hugging Face's platform reliability, safety, model evaluation, inference and deployment, while preserving the open ecosystem behind the service.
Community scale
Over the past decade, Hugging Face has grown from a startup focused on natural language tools into a central repository for open AI work. Its platform is used by individual developers, academic researchers, start-ups, large companies and public institutions.
The breadth of that user base helps explain the size of the transaction. Hugging Face is not only a storage site for models and datasets but also a distribution layer for a large share of the open AI market, giving model builders visibility and giving users a common place to assess available options.
For Nvidia, the acquisition comes as competition in AI is increasingly shaped as much by access to software ecosystems as by access to chips. Rivals across cloud computing, semiconductors and model development have all sought closer ties with developer communities as demand for AI services expands.
Nvidia framed the deal around broader access to AI and the role of open weights in spreading that access across companies, institutions and communities. It argued that open models let organisations build on advanced systems without training every model from scratch and match different models to different tasks.
Nvidia also linked open models to issues including cybersecurity, sovereignty and the spread of AI use across sectors such as healthcare, manufacturing, agriculture and education. Those claims reflect a wider industry debate over whether open access to model weights promotes competition and innovation or raises new security and policy concerns.
Integration questions
What happens next for Hugging Face will matter to model developers that compete with Nvidia in other parts of the AI stack, as well as to cloud groups and hardware suppliers whose products are currently supported on the platform. Nvidia said Hugging Face would keep its existing brand and indicated that the team would remain in place.
The acquisition was announced by Jensen Huang, Chief Executive Officer of Nvidia. "Together, we will scale Hugging Face's platform, strengthen its infrastructure and expand access to AI for developers and institutions worldwide," Huang said.
He also outlined Nvidia's position on the platform's future structure. "Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem. Developers will choose the models they want, the frameworks they want, the clouds and inference service providers they want and the computing platforms they want. NVIDIA compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face," Huang said.
On the company's view of the wider market, Huang said: "AI advances faster when people can build together."