Hugging Face

AI Infrastructure · Open-Source AI · Semiconductors

Acquisition

Nvidia to acquire Hugging Face for $12.9 billion

The chipmaker is buying software influence over the open-model ecosystem its own chips run on, not just another AI startup.

• Nvidia agreed to acquire open-source AI platform Hugging Face for roughly $12.93 billion, CEO Jensen Huang announced in a blog post.
• Founded in 2016, Hugging Face hosts over 3 million AI models, 500,000 datasets and 1 million applications used by more than 18 million developers and 200,000 companies.
• Of the total, Nvidia will pay about $11.9 billion to Hugging Face's investors, plus up to $1 billion in equity-based retention incentives for employees who join Nvidia.
• Nvidia says its chips will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face, and the platform will keep supporting rival clouds, frameworks and accelerators.
• Hugging Face CEO Clement Delangue said the company approached Huang directly over the summer, deciding open-source AI needed more resources and scale.
• Nvidia reportedly offered $500 million for Hugging Face last year and was rebuffed, per the Financial Times, underscoring how fast the company's perceived value has risen.
• It's Nvidia's second-largest deal ever, trailing only its $20 billion purchase of Groq assets last December and ahead of its ~$7 billion Mellanox acquisition in 2019.
• As Nvidia's biggest customers like Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI build their own chips to cut reliance on it, owning the developer layer where open models are shared gives Nvidia a new lever of influence beyond hardware.