NVIDIA has agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, confirming one of the largest deals yet involving a major open AI development platform. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang announced the agreement on September 3, saying the companies plan to scale Hugging Face’s infrastructure and expand access to AI tools for developers and institutions. The announcement follows reports in late August that NVIDIA was pursuing a deal valued at roughly $13 billion.
Hugging Face has become one of the central platforms for developers working with open and open-weight artificial intelligence models. According to NVIDIA, more than 18 million developers, researchers and creators use the service, which hosts over 3 million models, 500,000 datasets and 1 million applications. More than 200,000 companies also use Hugging Face to discover, evaluate, customize and deploy AI systems.
One of the most important parts of NVIDIA’s announcement concerns what will happen to that ecosystem after the acquisition. Huang said Hugging Face will remain an open platform and that developers will continue to be able to choose their preferred models, frameworks, cloud providers, inference services and computing platforms. NVIDIA hardware will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face, according to the company.
NVIDIA also says Hugging Face will continue supporting open-source and open-weight models from developers across the industry rather than becoming an NVIDIA-only distribution platform. Multi-cloud and multi-accelerator development and deployment are also expected to remain available. That commitment will be closely watched because NVIDIA already occupies a dominant position in the hardware used to train and run many modern AI systems.
The relationship between the two companies was already substantial before the acquisition agreement. NVIDIA says it is the largest contributor of open models and data to Hugging Face, with more than 500 models and 250 open datasets released on the platform. The chipmaker has increasingly built and distributed its own models, libraries and AI tools through open ecosystems as it expands beyond GPUs into software, model development and deployment infrastructure.
Huang said NVIDIA intends to use its infrastructure, engineering resources and global reach to improve Hugging Face’s reliability, safety, model evaluation, inference and deployment capabilities. At the same time, he stressed that the open ecosystem that established Hugging Face as a major AI development hub will be preserved. Hugging Face’s existing brand will also remain, rather than being replaced by NVIDIA branding.
Hugging Face was founded by Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf and initially began as a consumer chatbot project before evolving into a major repository and collaboration platform for machine learning. Its model hub has since become widely used by researchers, independent developers and large companies for distributing models and datasets. The platform’s role has grown further as open-weight models from companies including Meta, Google, Microsoft and numerous AI startups have become more prominent.
The $12.93 billion agreement also expands NVIDIA’s reach deeper into the software layer of the AI industry. The company is best known for GPUs used in data centers and AI training, but it has increasingly invested in networking, software libraries, inference services, models and other parts of the AI development stack. Acquiring Hugging Face would place one of the industry’s most widely used model distribution platforms under the same corporate umbrella.
That makes NVIDIA’s pledge to preserve hardware choice particularly significant. Hugging Face currently supports models and infrastructure designed to run across competing accelerators and cloud environments, and NVIDIA has explicitly said that arrangement will continue. Developers will therefore not be required to move workloads onto NVIDIA GPUs simply because they use Hugging Face.
NVIDIA has described the acquisition as a way to combine Hugging Face’s developer community with its own computing infrastructure and engineering resources. The companies have announced an agreement rather than the completion of the transaction, so Hugging Face has not yet simply become an NVIDIA division as of the September 3 announcement. If completed as planned, however, the $12.93 billion deal would give NVIDIA ownership of one of the most influential platforms in the open AI ecosystem while significantly expanding its position beyond the chips powering that ecosystem.
