Nvidia to Acquire Hugging Face for $12.9 Billion in Biggest Open AI Bet
Nvidia has agreed to acquire artificial intelligence developer platform Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, extending its AI spending spree and marking one of its largest acquisitions to date.
The deal was confirmed by Nvidia on Thursday after weeks of rumors first reported by The Information. The chipmaker will pay about $11.9 billion to Hugging Face investors and offer an equity-based retention program of up to $1 billion for employees who join Nvidia.
For Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, the acquisition is a strategic bet that open models will drive the next wave of AI demand even as its biggest customers — including Meta, OpenAI and Microsoft — develop their own chips to reduce reliance on its expensive, supply-constrained GPUs.
Hugging Face, founded in 2016 in New York by French entrepreneurs Clement Delangue, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf, has become the go-to hub for open-source and open-weight AI. The platform hosts more than three million models, one million applications, and half a million datasets, used by over 18 million developers.
“Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem,” Huang said in a blog post announcing the deal. “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.”
The company stressed that Hugging Face will continue to support open-source and open-weight models and expand developer access.
Nvidia is already the largest contributor of open models on the platform, with its Nemotron family and more than 500 models and 250 open datasets released. The two companies already collaborate to help developers use Nvidia computing services on Hugging Face.
The deal price represents a major markup from Hugging Face’s last funding round. In 2023, the startup raised $235 million led by Salesforce Ventures with participation from Google, Amazon, IBM and Nvidia itself, at a $4.5 billion valuation. The Financial Times reported the company rejected a $500 million investment offer from Nvidia in 2024 that would have valued it at $7 billion. The startup, backed by Intel, AMD and Amazon, has raised over $395 million to date and is clocking about $150 million in annualized revenue, according to The Information, and is close to profitability.
In a post on X, CEO Clem Delangue said joining Nvidia will provide more compute, support and visibility to scale as an alternative to closed-source APIs from OpenAI and Anthropic.
The acquisition cements Nvidia’s position in open models at a time when demand for open-weight models has surged from enterprises seeking lower deployment costs. Chinese players like DeepSeek and Z.ai have emerged with competitive open models, fueling concerns in the US that companies could become reliant on Beijing models.
For Nvidia, controlling the platform where developers collaborate, test and share tools provides valuable insight and could help narrow the technology gap with top US and Chinese labs, while also giving it a channel to sell unused capacity packaged with Hugging Face services.
Nvidia shares rose slightly after the announcement on Thursday. The company on Wednesday forecast a 70 percent jump in revenue next fiscal year, underscoring continued AI demand.
The deal is expected to close pending regulatory approvals and is among Nvidia’s biggest, signaling Huang’s view that AI demand is still expanding rather than peaking. #Nvidia to Acquire Hugging Face for $12.9 Billion in Biggest Open AI Bet# NVIDIA Tokenized Stock Gains 3% on Speculative Activity
