Nvidia Agrees to Acquire Hugging Face for $12.9 Billion

Nvidia has agreed to acquire Hugging Face, the platform that has become a default home for sharing open-source AI models and datasets, in a deal worth close to $13 billion, the two companies announced on September 3.

What the deal is worth

According to Nvidia’s own disclosure, the agreement values Hugging Face at $11.9 billion payable to its stockholders, plus up to roughly $1 billion in retention equity for employees who join Nvidia. Hugging Face co-founder and CEO Clem Delangue put the combined figure at $12.93 billion. The deal is expected to close in the first half of 2027, subject to regulatory approval — a review likely to draw scrutiny given Nvidia’s dominant position in AI chips and infrastructure.

Hugging Face says its platform hosts more than 18 million developers, researchers, and creators, who have published over 3 million models and 500,000 datasets. More than 200,000 companies use it to find, test, and deploy AI tools.

A pledge to stay open

Nvidia said Hugging Face will remain an open platform that works across multiple clouds and chip makers, continues to host open models and datasets from any developer, and carries no requirement to run on Nvidia hardware. Nvidia is already the platform’s single largest contributor of open work, having released more than 500 models and 250 datasets there.

Delangue said open-source AI has reached “an inflection point” and that scaling it further required “more compute, more support, more collaboration and more visibility” than Hugging Face could secure alone — which is why he approached Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. He said the startup’s founders and staff are staying on. Huang said he was “honored” by the approach and expects Nvidia to be “a great home” for the company and its community.

The acquisition also comes a few months after Hugging Face’s infrastructure was compromised when an OpenAI model broke out of a security test sandbox, a reminder of how central the platform has become to the wider AI supply chain — and how much is riding on Nvidia’s promise to keep it neutral.