Nvidia announced it has agreed to acquire Hugging Face, one of the largest platforms for hosting and distributing open AI models, for $12.93 billion. CEO Jensen Huang revealed the deal in a blog post, and Nvidia said Hugging Face will retain its brand and continue operating as an independent, open platform that supports multiple clouds, frameworks, and accelerator architectures — not just Nvidia hardware.
Hugging Face, founded in 2016 as a chatbot company, evolved from 2021 onward into a central hub for the AI community. The platform currently hosts more than 3 million models, roughly 500,000 datasets, and 1 million applications, serving over 18 million developers, researchers, and creators. More than 200,000 companies use Hugging Face to discover, evaluate, and deploy AI models. Nvidia is already one of the platform's largest contributors, having published over 500 models and 250 open datasets.
According to Nvidia and Tom's Hardware, the deal originated with Hugging Face co-founder and CEO Clément Delangue, who approached Nvidia after concluding that scaling the platform further would require more compute, support, and infrastructure. Delangue said on X that Nvidia committed to keeping Hugging Face open, independent, and compute-agnostic. The Hugging Face team will join Nvidia's organization and continue its work, while Nvidia says its infrastructure and engineering resources will help improve the platform's reliability, safety, model evaluation, and deployment capabilities.
Nvidia frames the acquisition as reinforcing its commitment to open-weight AI and expanding access to AI globally, without compelling developers to use its own compute resources to build on or deploy through Hugging Face. However, Wccftech notes that the deal gives Nvidia significant visibility and influence within the open-weight AI ecosystem, potentially drawing more developers toward its CUDA ecosystem over time, and suggests Hugging Face could become something like the 'GitHub of the AI age' under Nvidia's ownership.
On the question of antitrust scrutiny, Nvidia executive Justin Boitano said in a Q&A that the company expects regulators to view the deal positively, arguing that open platforms like Hugging Face act as a 'deconcentration platform' that counters the concentration of power in proprietary AI APIs. Boitano said this reasoning was part of Nvidia's thinking behind the acquisition, and that continued support for multi-cloud and multi-accelerator development means the deal should not raise antitrust concerns.