NVIDIA to acquire Hugging Face for $12.93B
| Source: AI News (ainews.com)
Tags: NVIDIA, Hugging Face, Jensen Huang, open-source, AI infrastructure, mergers and acquisitions, Julien Chaumond
NVIDIA has agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.93B, gaining the AI industry's primary open-source model hub — 18M developers, 3M+ models, 200K+ companies — while pledging hardware neutrality and support for all clouds and accelerators.
Details
NVIDIA's $12.93 billion acquisition of Hugging Face marks the largest deal in open-source AI history, consolidating the industry's primary model repository under the world's dominant AI hardware maker. Hugging Face hosts over 3 million models, 500,000 datasets, and 1 million applications, used by 18 million developers and 200,000+ companies. NVIDIA committed to preserving platform independence: its hardware won't be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face, and the platform will continue supporting alternative accelerators, multi-cloud setups, and open-weight models from all vendors. CEO Jensen Huang cited co-authoring an open letter arguing that open-weight models keep AI leadership accessible to startups, universities, and public institutions. Hugging Face co-founder Julien Chaumond noted the existential challenge facing open-source AI — that closed labs could outpace the open ecosystem without major infrastructure investment. The acquisition is intended to provide that scale. Whether NVIDIA's ownership meaningfully changes governance, data policies, or competitive neutrality remains uncertain. The openness pledges are non-binding, and EU and US regulators are likely to scrutinize the deal given Hugging Face's role as the central hub of the open AI supply chain.