Nvidia Buys Hugging Face for $12.9B, Promising the 'GitHub for AI' Stays Open

Nvidia has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Hugging Face, the open‑source AI development platform often described as the GitHub for AI, for approximately 12.9 billion dollars, the companies confirmed Thursday, following weeks of industry speculation about the deal.

According to Nvidia's regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the transaction consists of an approximately 11.9 billion dollar purchase price payable to Hugging Face stockholders, subject to certain adjustments, plus an equity‑based retention program of up to approximately 1 billion dollars for Hugging Face employees joining Nvidia, bringing the total deal value to roughly 12.9 billion dollars. The transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2027, subject to regulatory approval and other customary closing conditions.

Hugging Face was founded in 2016 in New York City by French entrepreneurs Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf, and has grown into one of the central hubs of the open‑source AI ecosystem. The platform now hosts more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets, and 1 million applications, used by more than 18 million developers, researchers, and creators, with more than 200,000 companies relying on it to discover, evaluate, customize, and deploy AI. Hugging Face has raised more than 395 million dollars in funding to date, according to Crunchbase, with its last disclosed round coming in 2023, a 235 million dollar raise led by Salesforce Ventures at a 4.5 billion dollar valuation, with participation from Google, Amazon, IBM, and Nvidia itself.

Notably, Nvidia had already tried and failed to acquire Hugging Face once before. According to the Financial Times, Hugging Face rejected a 500 million dollar acquisition offer from Nvidia last year, a figure that makes the eventual 12.9 billion dollar price tag roughly 26 times higher than what the company turned down. The Information reported last month that Hugging Face was generating approximately 150 million dollars in annualized revenue at the time this latest deal came together, and Delangue told TechCrunch in July that the company's growth rate was helping it get "close to profitability" even before any acquisition talks became public.

Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang framed the deal around scaling Hugging Face's existing mission rather than absorbing or redirecting it. "Together, we will scale Hugging Face's platform, strengthen its infrastructure and expand access to AI for developers and institutions worldwide," Huang wrote in a blog post announcing the deal. He emphasized that Hugging Face would "remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem," stating that "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," and that Nvidia systems would not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face going forward. "Hugging Face will continue to support open source and open weight models from across the ecosystem, from every model builder," Huang wrote. "It will continue to support multi‑cloud and multi‑accelerator development and deployment, so builders can use the hardware and infrastructure that best fit their work."

That pledge matters given how central Hugging Face has become to keeping the broader AI ecosystem functionally open, and given Nvidia's dominant position as the primary hardware platform underlying most AI development today. Huang has been an outspoken proponent of open‑weight models more broadly, recently co‑authoring an open letter, alongside leaders from across the industry, arguing that open weights broaden access to AI and help ensure AI leadership remains distributed across many companies rather than concentrated in a small number of closed labs. According to Delangue, the recent Hugging Face security breach, in which the company said engineering mistakes were partly to blame, was ultimately resolved using an Nvidia‑optimized version of a Chinese open‑weight model, an episode that appears to have deepened the working relationship between the two companies ahead of this acquisition.

Industry analysts have offered a straightforward read on Nvidia's underlying motivation. Siddy Jobe, a fund manager at Eonopolis Exponential Technologies, told CNBC that the acquisition fits neatly into what he described as Nvidia's five‑layer strategy spanning energy, chips, infrastructure, foundational models, and applications. "It is clear that Nvidia wants to be integrated in the entire stack vertically, going from energy to foundational models and also to applications," Jobe said. For a company that already dominates AI hardware, owning one of the primary platforms through which developers discover, share, and deploy the models running on that hardware brings Nvidia meaningfully closer to the actual workloads generating demand for its chips, while also giving it a channel to sell unused compute capacity packaged alongside Hugging Face's existing developer offerings.

The deal is not without its critics. The Register has flagged that regulators should scrutinize the acquisition closely, arguing that a 12.9 billion dollar deal of this scale will inevitably help cement Nvidia's already dominant market position and could harm competition across the broader AI hardware and infrastructure ecosystem, even with Nvidia's public commitments to keep Hugging Face open to competing chips and cloud providers. The deal also arrives alongside a broader pattern of Nvidia deploying its enormous AI‑driven profits to shore up the foundations of the ecosystem it depends on, including a reported 6 billion dollar deal with coding startup Poolside to develop open models and, according to the company's recent earnings call, more than 50 billion dollars invested into AI frontier labs to date.

Whether regulators ultimately clear the deal on the timeline Nvidia and Hugging Face have targeted, and whether Nvidia's public commitments to openness hold up once Hugging Face is fully absorbed into the world's most valuable chipmaker, will likely shape how the rest of the AI industry, including Nvidia's direct hardware competitors who also rely on Hugging Face's platform to reach developers, responds to what is already one of the largest acquisitions in the open‑source AI ecosystem's short history.