Nvidia to Acquire Hugging Face for $13 Billion

Nvidia confirmed Thursday it will acquire Hugging Face, the open-weight AI model platform, for approximately $13 billion in a deal that signals the chip maker's ambitions beyond hardware sales.

The acquisition, first reported by Yahoo Finance, values Hugging Face at $12.93 billion and is expected to close in the first half of 2027 pending regulatory approval. Nvidia shares rose more than 1% in early trading following the announcement.

Platform scale and reach

Hugging Face has become a central hub for AI development, hosting more than 3 million models shared by 18 million developers, researchers, and creators. More than 200,000 companies currently use the platform to discover and deploy AI models, according to Nvidia.

The platform will remain open to the entire AI ecosystem after the acquisition, Nvidia said. The company emphasized its commitment to supporting both open-weight and open-source AI models, noting that Nvidia is already the largest contributor of open models and data to Hugging Face.

Strategic positioning beyond chips

Nvidia enterprise computing general manager Justin Boitano said in a call following the announcement that the company believes in maintaining a healthy ecosystem of both closed and open models. He acknowledged that while Nvidia will benefit from training and inference workloads running on its hardware, the company intends to preserve developer optionality across hardware, cloud platforms, and other infrastructure choices.

"Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty," Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang wrote on X. "They allow every developer, startup, university, industry and country to build with, customize and benefit from AI."

Why it matters

The acquisition represents Nvidia's most significant move to establish itself as an AI platform company rather than solely a chip supplier. With chip demand currently robust but inevitably subject to future cycles, controlling a major distribution and collaboration platform for AI models gives Nvidia strategic leverage across the development stack. The $13 billion price tag, while substantial, represents a modest portion of Nvidia's expected $200 billion in free cash flow for fiscal year 2027.

BD8 CEO and Nvidia investor Barbara Doran characterized the deal as "a great strategic move," telling Yahoo Finance that Nvidia is "positioning themselves to be much more of an AI platform rather than just a supplier of chips." She noted that while current chip demand remains strong, "they are positioning themselves for the day when that will slow down."

Doran added that the expenditure should not concern investors given Nvidia's financial position, calling the $13 billion "not a big bite" relative to the company's cash generation.

Details of the acquisition were first reported by Yahoo Finance.