Nvidia is buying Hugging Face for almost $13 billion

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Nvidia confirmed its $12.93 billion acquisition of Hugging Face on September 3rd, with CEO Jensen Huang personally announcing the deal. The platform hosts over 3 million open-source models, 500,000 datasets, 1 million applications, and is used by more than 200,000 companies globally — making it the dominant infrastructure layer for open-source AI development. The strategic logic is clear: as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google invest in proprietary AI chips that could reduce Nvidia hardware dependency, owning the dominant open-source AI hub gives Nvidia a platform-level moat. Nvidia is already the largest contributor to Hugging Face, with over 500 models and 250+ datasets released — the acquisition accelerates that stake. Huang was explicit about platform neutrality: 'NVIDIA compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face.' The platform will maintain multi-cloud and multi-accelerator support. This pledge matters both for community trust and for likely antitrust review — regulators will scrutinize whether Nvidia uses ownership to advantage its own hardware. The deal closed at nearly 3x Hugging Face's 2023 valuation of $4.5B. The startup had previously rejected a $500 million Nvidia investment at a $7B valuation, citing concerns about a dominant single investor. That caution ultimately gave way to a full acquisition at $12.93B after acquisition talks reported by Business Insider and The Information in late August.