Nvidia confirms it will buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion

September 3, 2026 | Source: TechCrunch AI

Tags: Nvidia, Hugging Face, Jensen Huang, Clem Delangue, Salesforce Ventures, open-source, acquisition

TechCrunch confirms Nvidia's $12.93B Hugging Face deal with key financials: $150M annualized revenue approaching profitability, a $235M 2023 round backed by Salesforce, Google, Amazon, IBM, and Nvidia, and a $500M offer rejected just last year — making the final price a 26x revenue multiple.

Details

Nvidia officially confirmed its $12.93 billion acquisition of Hugging Face, the world's largest open-source AI repository. The platform hosts 3 million models, 1 million applications, 500,000 datasets, and 18 million developers. The financial picture adds important context. Hugging Face had raised $395 million total before this exit, including a $235 million round in 2023 led by Salesforce Ventures, with participation from Google, Amazon, IBM — and Nvidia itself. Annualized revenue stood at $150 million with the company approaching profitability. Last year, Hugging Face reportedly rejected a $500 million Nvidia acquisition offer, per the Financial Times; the final price is 26x that rejected figure. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang pledged that the platform will remain cloud-agnostic: 'Developers will choose the models they want, the frameworks they want, the clouds and inference service providers they want.' Huang noted Nvidia has already contributed 500+ models and 250 open datasets to Hugging Face. The acquisition is part of a broader Nvidia software-layer push: last month it struck a separate $6 billion deal with coding startup Poolside, and the company disclosed infusing over $50 billion into AI frontier labs through its earnings. As Amazon and Meta build custom chips to reduce GPU dependence, controlling the open-source developer hub is Nvidia's counter-move.