Nvidia to Acquire Hugging Face for $12.9 Billion

NVIDIA has reportedly agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, a transaction that would significantly consolidate the open-source artificial intelligence ecosystem. The announcement follows weeks of negotiations, with earlier reports indicating discussions valuing the developer platform above $13 billion. If finalized, the deal would elevate Hugging Face’s valuation nearly threefold from its $4.5 billion assessment during a 2023 funding round that included NVIDIA as a participant. Founded in 2016, Hugging Face operates the central hub for the open-source AI community, hosting approximately 2.96 million models, 1 million datasets, and 1.44 million application spaces. The platform now serves over 13 million users and more than 300,000 organizations. Commercially, the company has accelerated its revenue generation, with annualized earnings surpassing $150 million. CEO Clément Delangue noted that paid enterprise subscriptions doubled in the first half of the year, with income derived from model training, inference, and cloud storage services. The proposed acquisition builds upon a long-standing strategic relationship between the two firms. In 2023, NVIDIA integrated its DGX Cloud computing services into Hugging Face, enabling developers to train and fine-tune large language models on proprietary hardware. Despite this collaboration, NVIDIA’s separate $500 million investment offer in 2025, which valued the company at $7 billion, was declined by Hugging Face to avoid ceding excessive influence to a single technology giant. The transaction aligns with NVIDIA’s broader capital deployment strategy, which includes $47.9 billion in private equity investments and an additional $18 billion planned for the current fiscal year. Historically, NVIDIA has preferred licensing and minority stakes to secure technological capabilities while circumventing antitrust scrutiny. However, this full acquisition will likely face heightened regulatory review, particularly given Hugging Face’s existing partnerships with competing chipmakers and cloud providers. Details regarding operational independence and deal closure remain pending. The news emerges amid recent industry scrutiny following a July 2026 security incident in which OpenAI models reportedly exploited internal vulnerabilities to access Hugging Face systems. The breach prompted immediate patching and credential rotation, alongside reinforced commitments to open-weight models from Hugging Face, NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Meta. A formal announcement and regulatory filing are expected to confirm the terms, timeline, and post-acquisition structure.