NVIDIA to Acquire Hugging Face

Details

Jensen Huang's official announcement confirms NVIDIA's acquisition of Hugging Face for exactly $12,930,300,000. The platform hosts over 3 million models, 500,000 datasets, and 1 million applications, with more than 200,000 companies using it for AI discovery, evaluation, customization, and deployment. The community spans 18 million developers, researchers, and creators. 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, preserving developer choice of frameworks, hardware, and infrastructure providers. This open pledge matters both for community trust and for the antitrust review that a deal of this scale will likely face. NVIDIA is already Hugging Face's largest contributor, with over 500 released models and 250+ open datasets on the platform. The acquisition allows NVIDIA to scale those contributions and improve platform reliability, safety tooling, model evaluation, and inference capabilities — while preserving the open ecosystem that gives Hugging Face its value. Huang framed the deal as an investment in open-weight AI, referencing an open letter he co-authored on the importance of open weights to the global AI economy. The strategic read: as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google build proprietary chips that could reduce NVIDIA hardware dependency, owning the dominant open-source AI hub gives NVIDIA a platform-layer stake in the ecosystem regardless of which hardware wins inference workloads.