Nvidia confirms acquiring Hugging Face for $12.93 billion in biggest open-source AI bet yet

Nvidia has agreed to acquire artificial intelligence developer platform Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, in a major bet on open-source and open-weight AI and one of the chipmaker’s biggest acquisitions to date.

The deal brings together Nvidia, the world’s dominant AI chipmaker, and Hugging Face, one of the largest platforms for developers to discover, share, customise and deploy AI models.

More than 18 million developers, researchers and creators use Hugging Face, which hosts more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets and 1 million applications, according to Nvidia. More than 200,000 companies use the platform.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the acquisition will allow the company to “scale Hugging Face’s platform, strengthen its infrastructure and expand access to AI for developers and institutions worldwide.”

Nvidia says Hugging Face will remain open

Huang sought to directly address one of the biggest questions around the acquisition: whether Hugging Face will remain independent in how developers use models, software and computing infrastructure.

“Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem,” Huang said.

He added that developers will continue to be able to choose “the models they want, the frameworks they want, the clouds and inference service providers they want and the computing platforms they want.”

Most importantly, Huang said, "NVIDIA compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face.”

Nvidia also said Hugging Face will continue supporting open-source and open-weight models from across the AI ecosystem. The platform will support multi-cloud and multi-accelerator development and deployment, meaning developers will not be locked into Nvidia hardware.

That commitment is significant because Hugging Face has become a central platform for the open AI ecosystem. Developers use it to share models and datasets, evaluate them, modify them and build applications on top of them.

Why is Nvidia buying Hugging Face?

The acquisition gives Nvidia a much deeper presence in the software and developer layer of AI, beyond its core business of supplying the GPUs and other infrastructure used to train and run AI models.

Nvidia has already been investing heavily in open AI. Huang said the company has made “major contributions to open source platforms, including Hugging Face” and described Nvidia as the largest contributor of open models and data to Hugging Face.

The company has released more than 500 models and 250 open datasets on the platform, according to Huang.

The strategic importance goes beyond simply owning a repository of AI models. Hugging Face gives Nvidia direct access to a huge community of AI developers who are building, testing and deploying models.

The acquisition comes as the AI industry increasingly moves beyond simply scaling larger models and focuses on making AI models more accessible, customisable and deployable across different types of infrastructure.

Hugging Face CEO says open-source AI is at an “inflection point”

Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue framed the acquisition as a turning point for open-source AI. In a post announcing the deal, Delangue said, “10 years after starting Hugging Face, open-source AI is at an inflection point.”

He argued that the Hugging Face community had demonstrated that open-source AI could be “a complement, and even an alternative, to closed-source APIs.”

But scaling that model, he said, requires “more compute, more support, more collaboration and more visibility.”

“That’s why we went to talk to Jensen, who offered to do exactly that with us,” Delangue said.

His comments explain why Hugging Face sees Nvidia as a strategic fit. While open-source AI has expanded rapidly, developing and deploying increasingly capable models still requires substantial computing infrastructure.

Hugging Face wants open-source AI to become the default

Delangue said Nvidia has committed to supporting Hugging Face’s mission while keeping the platform “open, independent and compute agnostic.”

He also confirmed that the founders and the team will remain with the company. The longer-term ambition is considerably bigger than simply building a repository for AI models. “Together, we think we can make open source the default way to build AI,” Delangue said, setting a goal of empowering 100 million AI builders to “own their intelligence rather than rent it.”

The language reflects the broader shift underway in AI from closed APIs, where users access models controlled by companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic, towards open-weight models that developers can download, customise and deploy themselves.

What does the Hugging Face deal mean for Nvidia’s AI strategy?

For Nvidia, the Hugging Face acquisition reinforces Jensen Huang’s increasingly explicit support for open models.

Huang said open models and open weights can “broaden access to AI” and help ensure that AI capabilities are distributed across companies, institutions and communities.

He also argued that open models allow startups, businesses, universities and public institutions to use advanced AI capabilities without having to train every model from scratch.

“That is how AI can advance safely, strengthen cybersecurity and sovereignty, accelerate innovation, and reach factories, hospitals, farms, classrooms and Main Street businesses around the world,” Huang said.

The acquisition is therefore a bet not just on Hugging Face, but on a future in which open-source and open-weight AI become a much larger part of how businesses and developers build and deploy artificial intelligence.

Nvidia expects the transaction to close in the first half of 2027, subject to customary closing conditions and regulatory approvals. The deal includes approximately $11.9 billion payable to Hugging Face shareholders, along with an equity-based retention programme of up to about $1 billion for Hugging Face employees.