Nvidia has officially agreed to acquire the open-source artificial intelligence platform Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, marking a major expansion beyond hardware and deeper into the software stack of generative artificial intelligence, according to reports from CNBC and NBC News. Under the terms of the transaction, Nvidia will pay approximately $11.9 billion to investors alongside an equity-based retention program of up to $1 billion for employees.
Nvidia Announces $12.9 Billion Deal to Acquire Hugging Face
The agreement represents the largest outright acquisition in Nvidia’s history, eclipsing its $6.9 billion purchase of networking technology company Mellanox in 2020. The deal follows Nvidia’s $20 billion purchase of assets from chipmaker Groq in December. Industry reports indicated that the buyout had been anticipated following earlier discussions. Nvidia hopes to close the acquisition by 2027, though the transaction is expected to face scrutiny from competition regulators.
Preserving Open Standards and Ecosystem Access
Following the announcement, Nvidia leadership emphasized that the platform will maintain its current operational ethos. Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem,
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang wrote in a blog post on Thursday. Huang added that the chipmaker’s hardware will not be required to build on or deploy through the developer platform.
Hugging Face cofounder and CEO Clément Delangue told CNBC that he approached Huang over the summer because open-source AI had reached a turning point requiring greater resources, scale, and visibility. Delangue stated that he viewed Nvidia as a “perfect home” for the company.
Founded in New York City in 2016 by French entrepreneurs Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf, Hugging Face operates as a central repository for the developer community. According to company metrics cited by Yahoo Finance, the platform hosts 3 million primarily open AI models, 500,000 datasets, and 1 million AI applications, serving more than 18 million developers and over 200,000 companies. Prior to the acquisition, the 10-year-old startup had raised nearly $400 million in venture capital funding as of December 2025 from backers including Intel, Advanced Micro Devices, Amazon, Google, Betaworks, Lux Capital, Sequoia Ventures, Coatue, and Addition. Nvidia plans to maintain the Hugging Face brand.
Strategic Stakes Amid Hardware Shifts
The acquisition positions Nvidia more firmly within the open-weight model layer, contrasting with closed and proprietary systems developed by labs such as OpenAI and Anthropic. Open-weight designs allow startups, universities, and public institutions to download, customize, and run models without paying frontier-model prices for every task. Earlier this month, Nvidia rallied more than 80 companies to sign an open letter asking the United States government to defend open-weight artificial intelligence models.
For Nvidia, bolstering open-source infrastructure may help cushion potential demand slowdowns as major customers—including Meta, OpenAI, and Microsoft—develop their own custom AI chips to reduce reliance on the semiconductor giant’s costly processors. The platform acquisition also provides direct access to tools used by developers to collaborate, test, and share resources, offering valuable insights as competition intensifies with international labs and lower-cost models.