Nvidia to Buy Hugging Face for $12.9 Billion in Push Into Open-Source AI

SANTA CLARA, Calif. —

Nvidia confirmed Thursday that it will buy Hugging Face, the open-source AI hosting platform, for $12.93 billion, one of the largest acquisitions in the chipmaker's history.

Hugging Face hosts three million AI models, one million applications and half a million datasets used by more than 18 million developers, according to Nvidia. Often compared to GitHub for its role as a shared library and collaboration space for machine learning projects, the company was founded in 2016 by Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf, according to Channel NewsAsia.

Under the terms of the deal, Nvidia will pay about $11.9 billion to Hugging Face's investors and set aside up to $1 billion in equity to retain employees who join Nvidia, Channel NewsAsia reported. Nvidia's own shares dipped slightly after the announcement, according to the outlet.

An Open Platform, a Dominant Owner

In a blog post announcing the deal, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said Hugging Face would keep operating as neutral ground for the AI industry. "Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem," Huang said, according to The Verge. "Developers will choose the models they want, the frameworks they want, the clouds and inference service providers they want and the computing platforms they want. Nvidia compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face."

Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue framed the sale as a way to scale up, writing on X that reaching more developers required more computing power and support. "That's why we went to talk to Jensen, who offered to do exactly that with us," Delangue said, according to TechCrunch.

The price marks a sharp jump from Hugging Face's last funding round in 2023, when it raised $235 million at a $4.5 billion valuation led by Salesforce Ventures, with Google, Amazon, IBM and Nvidia also investing, TechCrunch reported. Nvidia had offered $500 million for a stake last year, valuing the startup at $7 billion, an offer Hugging Face turned down, according to the Financial Times. The Information has reported that Hugging Face generates roughly $150 million in annualized revenue, a small fraction of the purchase price.

Why Nvidia Wants In

Nvidia dominates the hardware used to build and run AI systems, but some of its biggest customers, including Meta, OpenAI and Microsoft, are now developing their own chips to cut their reliance on Nvidia's processors, according to Channel NewsAsia. At the same time, Chinese companies such as DeepSeek and Z.ai have built open-weight models that rival top American and Chinese labs at a lower cost, the outlet reported, feeding worries in Washington that American firms could grow dependent on technology built in China.

Owning Hugging Face gives Nvidia a direct line into how developers worldwide build and share AI tools, along with a platform it can use to sell spare computing capacity to enterprise customers, TechCrunch reported. Hugging Face is backed by Intel, Advanced Micro Devices and Amazon and is based in New York, according to Channel NewsAsia.