What changed: Nvidia acquired Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, fundamentally strengthening its position across the open-source AI ecosystem.
Nvidia has announced the acquisition of Hugging Face, the leading hosting platform for open-source AI models, datasets, and tools, for $12.93 billion. The deal was independently confirmed by TechCrunch and The Verge, with both outlets citing a public blog post by CEO Jensen Huang.
Huang pledged that Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem. "Developers will choose the models they want, the frameworks they want, the clouds and inference service providers they want and the computing platforms they want. Nvidia compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face," he said. The platform currently hosts three million models, one million applications used by over 18 million developers, and half a million datasets.
Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue wrote on X that the transformation he envisions requires more compute, support, collaboration, and visibility at a larger scale, and that Jensen Huang offered to provide exactly that. According to reports citing the Financial Times, Hugging Face had previously rejected a $500 million investment offer from Nvidia, reportedly over concerns about having a single, dominant investor.
On the financial side, the company's last official valuation stood at $4.5 billion, following a 2023 funding round in which Nvidia participated alongside Salesforce Ventures, Google, Amazon, and IBM, raising $235 million. According to reports citing Crunchbase, total funding raised since founding exceeds $395 million. The Information has reported that annualized revenue is approximately $150 million.
Speculation about a potential acquisition emerged after Business Insider reported that the startup was exploring sale options through a bank. Nvidia had already released more than 500 models and 250 open datasets on Hugging Face, reflecting the depth of the pre-existing technical partnership between the two companies.
Key facts
- Nvidia acquired Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, independently confirmed by TechCrunch and The Verge.
- The platform hosts 3 million models, 1 million applications used by over 18 million developers, and half a million datasets.
- Jensen Huang pledged that Hugging Face will remain an open platform and that Nvidia compute will not be required.
- Hugging Face had previously rejected a $500 million investment offer from Nvidia; its last official valuation was $4.5 billion.
- According to The Information, Hugging Face's annualized revenue is approximately $150 million.
Why it matters
The world's largest AI chipmaker taking ownership of the de facto standard platform for open models and tools deepens questions about ecosystem control and independence.
Watch next: How Hugging Face's platform independence pledges play out in practice, and how competition regulators assess the deal.
Source date: 2026-09-04T12:18:03.404Z · Verification confidence: 85/100
