Nvidia to Buy Hugging Face for $12.93 Billion

Nvidia has confirmed it will acquire Hugging Face for approximately $12.93 billion, closing out weeks of speculation that began when Business Insider first reported acquisition talks on August 27. The deal values the "GitHub for AI" at nearly three times the $4.5 billion mark set in its last funding round in 2023.

That earlier round, a $235 million raise led by Salesforce Ventures with participation from Google, Amazon, IBM and Nvidia itself, brought Hugging Face's total funding to more than $395 million. The company had also turned down a much smaller offer: a $500 million investment from Nvidia last year that would have pegged its valuation at just $7 billion.

The numbers behind the acquisition explain why Nvidia was willing to pay up. Hugging Face now hosts over 3 million models and roughly 1 million applications, drawing more than 18 million developers to the platform. Its annualized revenue reached $150 million as of last month.

Nvidia is not a newcomer to the ecosystem it is now buying. The chipmaker has already contributed more than 500 models and 250 open datasets to Hugging Face, and both companies were among 25 signatories, including CEO Jensen Huang, on a letter urging U.S. regulators to support rather than restrict open-weight models.

Why Hugging Face said yes

CEO Clem Delangue framed the sale as a matter of scale rather than survival, saying the company needed Nvidia's backing to secure the compute, engineering support and visibility to keep growing. Delangue had already been aligning publicly with Nvidia's open-source strategy earlier in 2026, well before formal talks surfaced.

Huang, for his part, pledged that Hugging Face will remain an open platform after the deal closes, a commitment that will matter to a developer community wary of what an infrastructure giant's ownership might mean for a hub built on neutrality and openness.

Huang committed to keeping Hugging Face an open platform, addressing the core concern of a developer base that depends on the site's neutrality.

The transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2027, pending regulatory approval and other standard conditions, leaving several months during which antitrust scrutiny could reshape or delay the terms. It follows Nvidia's separate $6 billion arrangement with coding startup Poolside to build open models, part of a broader pattern of the company buying and funding its way deeper into the open-source AI stack it depends on to sell chips.

For a platform that once rebuffed a $7 billion valuation from the same buyer, the jump to nearly $13 billion in roughly a year reflects how quickly the value of owning developer distribution in AI has risen, and how much leverage Hugging Face had before deciding it no longer needed to hold out.