Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $12.93 billion

On September 3, Nvidia announced it had agreed to acquire open-source AI platform Hugging Face for $12.93 billion. Under the terms, Nvidia will pay Hugging Face shareholders approximately $11.9 billion in cash and stock, and will provide up to $1 billion in equity-based retention incentives for employees joining Nvidia. The acquisition is Nvidia's largest single deal to date, surpassing its $20 billion purchase of chipmaker Groq-related assets in December 2025 and far exceeding the $6.9 billion it paid for networking technology company Mellanox in 2019.

Hugging Face was founded in New York in 2016 as an open-source community platform for AI, where developers can publish, download, and fine-tune open-source models. The platform now has more than 18 million developers, researchers, and creators, hosting over 3 million models, 500,000 datasets, and 1 million applications. More than 200,000 enterprises use the platform to explore, evaluate, customize, and deploy AI. Nvidia said it has published over 500 models and 250 open datasets on Hugging Face, making it the largest contributor of open-source models and datasets on the platform.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in a statement that Hugging Face will continue to operate as an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem, allowing developers to freely choose models, frameworks, cloud services, and inference service providers, and that building or deploying products on the platform does not require the use of Nvidia's computing resources. Hugging Face CEO Clement Delangue said that in the summer of 2026, the company realized that Hugging Face and the entire open-source AI field were at a turning point, requiring more resources, greater scale, and higher visibility, so it proactively approached Nvidia, and negotiations progressed quickly to reach the deal.

Hugging Face's last external funding round was completed in 2023, led by Salesforce Ventures, raising $235 million at a valuation of $4.5 billion, with Nvidia participating. At the end of 2025, Nvidia attempted to invest $500 million separately in Hugging Face, but was rejected. Hugging Face's annualized revenue grew from approximately $100 million to $150 million in the first half of 2026, with the number of paid subscribers doubling. Previously, Hugging Face experienced a security incident in which a runaway new OpenAI model attacked its platform.

Mergers and acquisitions in the AI infrastructure sector have been active recently. A few days before Nvidia announced the Hugging Face acquisition, payments company Stripe acquired AI model routing platform OpenRouter for more than $8 billion. In 2018, Microsoft acquired code-hosting platform GitHub for $7.5 billion, and IBM acquired Red Hat for approximately $34 billion, with both promising to maintain the independence of the acquired platforms.