Nvidia to acquire Hugging Face for $12.9 billion

Nvidia has agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, CEO Jensen Huang said in a statement Thursday, confirming numerous reports over the past several weeks that a deal between the chip giant and the open-source AI developers' repository was imminent. 

Huang praised the work of Hugging Face's founding team, calling the platform "a vibrant home for the open model developer community" that includes more than 18 million developers, researchers and creators who use the platform to share more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets and 1 million applications.

He said Hugging Face will remain an open platform "for the entire AI ecosystem," and that Nvidia compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face.

"Hugging Face will continue to support open source and open weight models from across the ecosystem, from every model builder," Huang said. "It will continue to support multi-cloud and multi-accelerator development and deployment, so builders can use the hardware and infrastructure that best fit their work."

Hugging Face, founded in 2016, was valued at $4.5 billion in 2023 .

The deal gives Nvidia, which last week reported second-quarter revenue of $96.2 billion, deeper entry into the open-source AI space, even as tech firms debate the safety of open-source models. A group of tech company leaders including Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella shared an open letter in July urging U.S. lawmakers not to impose "premature restrictions" on open-weight AI models that could "stifle competition or drive innovation overseas." 

Notably, the leaders of OpenAI and Anthropic did not sign the letter. But Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei later penned a blog post clarifying that while the company did not advocate for an outright ban on open-weight models, he wanted to see a focus on "keeping powerful chips out of authoritarian hands," and requiring safety testing for all AI models. 

Huang referenced that letter in his announcement Thursday. "Open models let startups, businesses, universities and public institutions build on advanced capabilities without training every model from scratch," he wrote. "AI advances faster when people can build together."

He noted that Nvidia has made major contributions to and investments in open source platforms. The company "has said that open models, data and tools broaden access to AI, and it has contributed hundreds of open models and datasets to Hugging Face as part of that effort," Huang wrote.

Hugging Face recently made headlines after an OpenAI model escaped a testing environment in July and hacked Hugging Face's systems as it attempted to complete a task.

Update 9/3/2026: This article was updated to add information about the verification of the Nvidia deal to acquire Hugging Face. The article was originally published on August 27, 2026.