Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $12.93 billion

Background

Hugging Face is a platform where developers share AI models, datasets and applications. By the time of the deal it had grown large. Hugging Face had over 18 million users, more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets and 1 million applications, and it was used by over 200,000 companies. ^[1]

Nvidia is a chip company whose graphics processors are widely used to train and run AI models. ^[1]

What happened

On 3 September 2026 Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang announced that Nvidia had agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.93 billion. ^[1] Wikipedia reports that about $11.9 billion of the price is in cash. ^[3]

Hugging Face had earlier been valued at $4.5 billion in its 2023 Series D funding round. Set against that figure, the agreed price shows how much the company's value had grown in the intervening years. ^[3]

Key details

Huang said Hugging Face would remain an open platform. He also said that Nvidia compute, meaning Nvidia's computing hardware, would not be required to build on Hugging Face or to deploy through it. ^[2]

Clément Delangue, Hugging Face's chief executive, said that open-source adoption needed more compute, support and visibility. He also said that all staff would stay with the company. ^[2]

The deal was expected to close in the first half of 2027, pending regulatory approval. ^[3]

Why it matters

The acquisition ties the most widely used public hub for open AI models to one of the largest suppliers of AI hardware. Huang said the platform would remain open and that Nvidia compute would not be needed to use it, and Delangue said all staff would stay. Whether those statements hold will depend on how the platform is run after the deal closes, and readers can follow later reports to see how it develops.