Nvidia to acquire Hugging Face for $12.9B

Nvidia (NVDA) has agreed to acquire artificial intelligence startup Hugging Face in a transaction valued at about $12.9 billion, with some reports rounding the figure to roughly $13 billion. The deal gives Nvidia ownership of a major open-source AI platform that has become central to how developers access and share machine learning models. The acquisition adds to Nvidia’s broader spending on AI infrastructure and software as demand for generative and traditional AI systems continues to grow.

Hugging Face operates a widely used repository for AI models, datasets and applications. It has evolved into a core part of the toolchain for researchers, startups and large enterprises building AI systems, and the size of the community on the platform reflects this central role.

Nvidia has stressed that Hugging Face will continue to operate as an open platform following the acquisition. The company said it will keep Hugging Face’s platform open and consistent with the startup’s existing practices. In a blog post, Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang wrote that Hugging Face "will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem".

Huang also stated that developers will not be required to use Nvidia compute to build on or deploy through Hugging Face. This commitment is aimed at preserving the platform’s hardware-agnostic nature, which has been a key factor in its broad adoption. The messaging around the deal emphasizes continuity for current users while suggesting that additional resources could expand what is available on the hub.

Hugging Face currently hosts roughly 3 million AI models, providing a large catalog of tools that can be integrated into research and production systems. Alongside the model library, the platform offers about 500,000 datasets and around 1 million applications, creating a broad ecosystem of reusable AI components.

More than 18 million developers and researchers use Hugging Face across some 200,000 organizations. These users include individuals and teams working on diverse AI tasks, from language and vision systems to specialized domain models. The scale of this community is a key asset in the acquisition, giving Nvidia deeper reach into the day-to-day workflows of AI practitioners.

The acquisition strengthens Nvidia’s position not only as a supplier of AI hardware, but also as a provider of core AI software infrastructure. By bringing Hugging Face into its portfolio, Nvidia gains direct exposure to a major distribution channel for AI models used across industry and research. The transaction aligns with Nvidia’s ongoing investments in AI platforms while keeping the Hugging Face service open to a broad range of users and technologies.

As the deal moves forward, the companies are signaling that the focus will be on expanding access to AI for developers and institutions worldwide while maintaining the openness that has defined Hugging Face to date. The combination of Nvidia’s resources with Hugging Face’s community and content library is positioned to influence how AI models are built, shared and deployed across the global ecosystem.