Nvidia Agrees to Buy Hugging Face for $12.9 Billion, Pledges to Keep the Hub Open

Nvidia has agreed to buy Hugging Face, the hub where developers share open AI models and datasets, for about $12.9 billion. It is the chipmaker’s largest outright acquisition, far bigger than its $6.9 billion purchase of Mellanox in 2020, Ars Technica reported.

Hugging Face hosts about 3 million mostly open models, roughly 500,000 datasets and 1 million AI applications, and more than 200,000 companies use it, according to Nvidia. Only last year, Hugging Face turned down a large Nvidia investment at a $7 billion valuation to protect its independence.

The neutrality pledge

Nvidia said Hugging Face “will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem,” with its more than 18 million developers free to choose their models, cloud providers and chips. In a blog post, CEO Jensen Huang said Nvidia won’t require the platform’s users to run their workloads on its silicon, SiliconANGLE reported.

“Open weights enable start-ups, established businesses, universities, and public institutions to build on advanced capabilities without training every model from scratch or paying frontier-model prices for every task,” Huang said in a statement.

Not everyone reads the deal as mainly about openness. “Nvidia gains visibility into customer’s preferences and the AI models they use,” Forrester principal analyst Naveen Chhabra told SiliconANGLE, adding that the company can see “which models are trending” weeks before they hit the news. Some of the purchase price will flow to Nvidia’s competitors: AMD, Intel and Qualcomm backed Hugging Face’s most recent funding round, along with Salesforce, which reportedly wanted to buy the company itself.

Why Hugging Face said yes this time

On a call about the deal, CEO Clément Delangue said Hugging Face had turned down many investment and acquisition offers, “but I think this summer the planets aligned,” The Register reported. He wants to grow from 18 million AI builders to 100 million “in the next few years.”

According to Nvidia’s SEC filing, the price breaks down into about $11.9 billion for Hugging Face stockholders and a retention program of up to about $1 billion in equity for employees joining Nvidia. The company expects to close in the first half of 2027, pending regulatory approvals, and the deal is likely to draw scrutiny from competition regulators. “We will have to get through all the regulatory review. But we think overwhelmingly they’re going to see this as really a positive outcome,” said Justin Boitano, Nvidia’s vice president of enterprise AI.