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September 3, 2026
Nvidia’s $12.93 Billion Hugging Face Bet Puts Open AI on a Powerful New Foundation
Nvidia’s acquisition of Hugging Face promises more compute and global reach for open AI developers, while raising fresh questions about a dominant chipmaker gaining control of a crucial community platform.
Nvidia says its $12.93 billion purchase of Hugging Face will fortify an open AI ecosystem, while Hugging Face’s leadership frames the deal as the scale-up its community needs. The harder question is whether a platform built around developer choice can stay meaningfully independent under the world’s dominant AI-chip supplier.
After weeks of deal reports, Nvidia formally confirmed it would acquire Hugging Face, the 2016-founded platform often likened to a GitHub for AI. The repository now hosts more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets and 1 million applications used by over 18 million developers.1
The transaction follows a sharp escalation from last year, when Hugging Face reportedly rejected a $500 million Nvidia investment proposal amid concerns about taking on a single dominant investor. Its last disclosed valuation was $4.5 billion in 2023; recent annualized revenue was reported at roughly $150 million, making the nearly $13 billion price tag a strategic rather than purely financial wager.2
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s central pledge is that developers will retain control. “Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem,” he said, adding that users will choose their models, frameworks, clouds and inference providers — and that “Nvidia compute will not be required” to build or deploy through the platform.1 Nvidia says the combination will scale infrastructure and widen access for developers and institutions worldwide.2
Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue says the company sought out Huang over the summer because open-source AI had reached “a turning point” requiring “more resources, more scale, more visibility.” He called Nvidia “a perfect home” and said talks moved quickly.3
The acquisition nevertheless gives Nvidia a prized position higher up the AI stack, at a time when major closed-model companies are pursuing their own chips. For Nvidia, an open platform can broaden the developer ecosystem around its hardware even without formally requiring it — turning a promise of choice into a formidable strategic advantage.2