Nvidia has confirmed its $12.9 billion acquisition of Hugging Face, taking control of one of the most widely used platforms for sharing artificial intelligence models, datasets and applications.. The deal was announced on September 3 and is Nvidia’s second-largest acquisition, after its $20 billion purchase of Groq’s assets last year..
Hugging Face is used by more than 18 million developers and hosts over 3 million models, 500,000 datasets and 1 million applications across 200,000 companies.. The $12.9 billion price includes an $11.9 billion valuation for Hugging Face and roughly $1 billion in equity-based retention.
Hugging Face was valued at $4.5 billion in 2023.. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said Hugging Face “will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem” and will “continue to support open source and open weight models from across the ecosystem, from every model builder”.. Nvidia Vice President of AI software Justin Boitano said Nvidia-specific runtimes will coexist with open-source alternatives such as vLLM and SGLang, so models can be optimized for all hardware..
Hugging Face co-founder and CEO Clement Delangue said “the vast majority of what we do is open source, open models, open datasets that are by definition neutral”.. Skeptics say Nvidia now owns the main distribution platform where rivals publish and share their work. The acquisition gives Nvidia commercial leverage, including the ability to package Hugging Face access with its own computing capacity for enterprise customers..
Willy Lee, principal at Neostellar Capital, told Benzinga the deal is “less about NVIDIA owning open-source models and more about ensuring that, regardless of which models win, NVIDIA remains deeply embedded in how those models are discovered, customized and ultimately deployed”.. Delangue said Nvidia’s support will help Hugging Face pursue its goal of reaching 100 million builders, up from 18 million today.
The deal is subject to regulatory review in the European Union and the United States, with closing expected in the first half of 2027.. Featured image credit. Tags: hugging faceNvidia
