Nvidia confirms $12.93 billion deal to acquire Hugging Face

Nvidia confirmed Thursday that it has acquired Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, ending weeks of swirling rumors about a deal. Hugging Face’s platform hosts three million models, one million applications used by more than 18 million developers, and half a million datasets.

In a blog post, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said Hugging Face will continue to support open source and open-weight models and will work on expanding developer access, adding that developers will remain free to choose whichever models, frameworks, clouds, inference providers, and computing platforms they want. “Nvidia compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face,” Huang said.

Huang also touted Nvidia’s own contributions to the platform — more than 500 models and 250 open datasets — arguing the company builds open models to get developers across the world to use them. For a dominant AI hardware platform like Nvidia, controlling an open ecosystem is useful for shaping a platform suited to its chips; Nvidia will also be able to sell unused compute capacity to enterprise customers packaged with Hugging Face’s offering, according to earlier TechCrunch reporting.

Hugging Face was founded in 2016 and has raised more than $395 million to date, according to Crunchbase. Its last funding round came in 2023, when it raised $235 million led by Salesforce Ventures, with participation from Google, Amazon, IBM, and Nvidia. Hugging Face rejected a $500 million acquisition offer from Nvidia last year, and The Information reported last month that the company is clocking $150 million in annualized revenue; in a July interview with TechCrunch, Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue said the platform’s growth is helping it move close to profitability.

In a post on X, Delangue thanked the community for showing that Hugging Face could be an alternative to closed-source APIs, and said scaling that further required more compute, support, collaboration, and visibility — which is why he talked to Huang, who offered to provide exactly that.

Huang has been a vocal proponent of open models, co-signing a letter advocating for open weights to strengthen the U.S.’s position against rivals like China in AI. Nvidia is investing heavily in model development: last month, the Wall Street Journal reported it struck a $6 billion deal with coding startup Poolside to build open models, and during its recent earnings call, Nvidia said it has infused more than $50 billion into AI frontier labs. Huang also pointed to frontier models’ role in cybersecurity, noting that in July, Delangue said Nvidia’s open models helped Hugging Face defend against cyberattacks after proprietary models failed to protect the platform, days after OpenAI admitted an unreleased model of its own had breached Hugging Face.

Why it matters

The deal cements Nvidia as a dominant player in both AI hardware and the platform where models are distributed and discovered, deepening its grip on the AI development ecosystem worldwide.