NVIDIA Agrees to Acquire Hugging Face for $12.93 Billion
NVIDIA agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, pledging open models, hardware choice and multi-cloud access for its 18 million users worldwide.
Summary
NVIDIA agreed on September 3, 2026, to acquire Hugging Face for exactly $12,930,300,000, adding the open AI platform built over a decade by Clem, Julien, Thomas and their team. More than 18 million developers, researchers and creators share over 3 million models, 500,000 datasets and 1 million applications there, while more than 200,000 companies use it to discover, evaluate, customize and deploy AI. NVIDIA plans to scale the platform and strengthen its infrastructure, reliability, safety, model evaluation, inference and deployment capabilities.
Hugging Face will retain its brand and remain open to all model builders, frameworks, clouds, inference providers and computing platforms, with NVIDIA compute optional and multi-cloud, multi-accelerator, open source and open weight support continuing. NVIDIA, Hugging Face’s largest contributor of open models and data, has published more than 500 models and 250 open datasets there alongside multiyear open source investments. A recent industry open letter argued that open weights broaden AI access and distribute leadership across companies, institutions and communities. Closing timing, approvals and detailed safeguards for the promised neutrality remain unspecified.
Positives
- More than 18 million users and 200,000 companies could benefit from NVIDIA’s infrastructure, engineering resources and global reach.
- Over 3 million models, 500,000 datasets and 1 million applications will remain accessible through Hugging Face’s open platform.
- NVIDIA compute will not be required for developers building or deploying through Hugging Face.
- More than 500 NVIDIA models and 250 open datasets already demonstrate the company’s contributions to the platform.
- Multi-cloud and multi-accelerator support will continue, preserving choices among hardware, frameworks and inference providers.
Risks & concerns
- The $12,930,300,000 acquisition places a foundational open AI platform under the ownership of a major computing supplier.
- No closing timetable, approval process or other transaction conditions were disclosed.
- Hugging Face’s promised hardware neutrality and ecosystem openness lack detailed post-acquisition safeguards.
- More than 18 million users and 200,000 companies depend on NVIDIA maintaining the platform choices it has promised.