Nvidia Agrees to Buy Hugging Face, Betting Big on Open AI Models

Updated Oct. 26, 2026, 1:55 a.m. ET: Adds that Nvidia officially announced the deal on Sept. 3 at $12.93 billion, along with its commitments on keeping Hugging Face open.

Nvidia has agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, The Information reported Wednesday night, citing a source familiar with the matter. Business Insider, which first reported the takeover interest over the weekend, said the talks would value the company at more than $13 billion but hadn’t yet produced a signed agreement, TechCrunch reported. Neither company commented.

Why Nvidia wants the open-model hub

Hugging Face, founded in 2016, is one of the most popular places for developers to share and download open AI models. As TechCrunch noted, owning it would give Nvidia a strong foothold in open-source AI at a time when the biggest closed labs, including OpenAI, Google, Amazon and Anthropic, are building their own chips to reduce their dependence on Nvidia. A healthy open-model ecosystem gives customers alternatives to those labs, and most of those alternatives run on Nvidia hardware. Nvidia has already invested heavily in its own open models, and Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue has spent much of the year publicly aligned with Nvidia’s open-source push.

The deal became official

On Sept. 3, Nvidia announced it had agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12,930,300,000. According to Nvidia, more than 18 million developers, researchers and creators use the platform to share over 3 million models, 500,000 datasets and 1 million applications, and more than 200,000 companies use it.

Nvidia’s biggest promise is neutrality. Hugging Face “will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem,” the company wrote, and “NVIDIA compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face.” Nvidia says the platform will keep supporting open-source and open-weight models from every model builder and multi-cloud, multi-accelerator deployment. Nvidia already describes itself as the largest contributor of open models and data to Hugging Face, with more than 500 models and 250 datasets.

Developers and companies that depend on Hugging Face will be watching whether those commitments hold, especially for model builders whose hardware competes with Nvidia’s. For now, Nvidia is betting that a bigger open ecosystem is good for its business no matter whose models win.