Nvidia to Acquire Hugging Face for $12.93 Billion

Nvidia Expands AI Ecosystem with Major Acquisition

Nvidia has announced it will acquire Hugging Face, a leading open-source AI platform, for $12.93 billion. CEO Jensen Huang disclosed the deal in a blog post, marking one of the chip maker's largest acquisitions to date.

The transaction gives Nvidia ownership of a platform that has become central infrastructure for AI development. Hugging Face hosts more than three million AI models, one million applications, and over 500,000 datasets. The platform serves a developer community exceeding 18 million people, with more than 200,000 companies using it to discover, customize, and deploy AI systems.

Founded in 2016, Hugging Face established itself as a GitHub-equivalent for artificial intelligence, allowing researchers and developers to access and share pre-trained models for tasks including text generation, speech-to-text, and text-to-speech conversion. The platform offers both free and paid services for accessing models and running inference workloads.

Platform Will Remain Open

Huang emphasized that the acquisition will not restrict the platform's openness. "Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem," he stated. "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 CEO said the platform will continue supporting open-source and open-weight models from all model builders, maintaining compatibility with multiple clouds and hardware accelerators beyond Nvidia's own offerings.

Nvidia has been a significant contributor to the Hugging Face ecosystem, having released more than 500 models and over 250 open datasets on the platform. Huang described Nvidia as the largest contributor of open models and data.

Why It Matters

This acquisition positions Nvidia to control critical AI infrastructure beyond its dominant chip business. With Hugging Face serving as a primary distribution channel for AI models, Nvidia gains influence over how millions of developers access and deploy AI—even as it promises to keep the platform vendor-neutral. The deal also reflects the strategic value of open-source AI platforms as companies compete to shape the industry's development ecosystem.

Financial and Strategic Context

Hugging Face's most recent funding round occurred in 2023, when it raised $235 million led by Salesforce Ventures. That round included investments from Google, Amazon, IBM, and Nvidia itself, signaling broad industry interest in the platform's success.

Nvidia stated it aims to "scale Hugging Face's platform, strengthen its infrastructure and expand access to AI for developers and institutions worldwide" under its ownership.

The acquisition follows Nvidia's recent announcement of expanded collaboration with MediaTek to develop future AI computing platforms, indicating the company's continued push to broaden its AI ecosystem beyond chip manufacturing.

These details were first reported by Verdict, a GlobalData publication.