Nvidia agrees to buy Hugging Face for US$12.9 billion

Nvidia has agreed to acquire Hugging Face in a deal worth US$12.93 billion, bringing one of the best-known open-source AI platforms into the orbit of the company that supplies much of the hardware powering modern machine learning.

The figure comes from Nvidia’s announcement: US$12,930,300,000. The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions, and the companies have not described it as completed.

Why Hugging Face matters

Hugging Face hosts models, datasets and developer tools used across the open-source AI ecosystem. Nvidia says the platform has more than 3 million models and is used by over 18 million developers.

For Nvidia, the attraction is not simply another AI app. Hugging Face gives it a direct relationship with developers experimenting with models, inference and agentic tools.

The open-source question

Hugging Face’s value is closely tied to its broad developer community. Nvidia will need to convince that community that deeper corporate ownership will bring better infrastructure without narrowing access or making the platform feel like a shop window for one hardware vendor.

Our opinion

This is a huge strategic move. Nvidia gets a powerful bridge into the open-source AI workflow, while Hugging Face gets access to extraordinary infrastructure resources. The risk is cultural, so Nvidia should resist turning the front door into a sales funnel.

Sources: NVIDIA Blog — https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-to-acquire-hugging-face/ | TechCrunch — https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/03/nvidia-confirms-it-will-buy-hugging-face-for-12-9-billion/ | The Verge — https://www.theverge.com/tech/985474/nvidia-buying-hugging-face-deal