NVIDIA to acquire Hugging Face for $12.93B, pledges to keep the platform open
On Sept 3 NVIDIA announced an agreement to acquire open-model platform Hugging Face for about $12.93B, pledging to keep it open and not require NVIDIA compute.
On September 3, NVIDIA formally announced an agreement to acquire the open-model platform Hugging Face for about $12.93 billion, one of the largest acquisitions in NVIDIA's history. Under the deal, NVIDIA will pay roughly $11.9 billion to Hugging Face investors and provide up to $1 billion in equity-incentive plans to retain staff.
Hugging Face is one of the largest open-source machine learning collaboration platforms in the world, hosting more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets, and 1 million AI applications, with a community of more than 18 million developers and researchers.
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang publicly pledged that Hugging Face will continue to operate as an open platform, and explicitly stated that "NVIDIA compute will not be required." The transaction is subject to regulatory approval and is expected to close in the first half of 2027.
Analysts noted that NVIDIA, which controls GPU supply, is now bringing the primary distribution channel for open-weight models under its roof, and its openness pledge will be tested by commercial gravity. Institutions that built their AI strategy around open models on Hugging Face should watch whether the platform remains genuinely vendor-neutral or gradually tilts toward NVIDIA infrastructure.