NVIDIA agrees to buy Hugging Face for $12.93 billion

NVIDIA announced on Thursday that it has agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12,930,300,000. In a blog post, CEO Jensen Huang said the company will scale Hugging Face's platform, strengthen its infrastructure and expand access to AI for developers and institutions worldwide. Huang wrote that more than 18 million developers, researchers and creators use Hugging Face to share more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets and 1 million applications, and that more than 200,000 companies use the platform. He said Hugging Face will remain an open platform, that developers will choose their own models, frameworks, clouds and computing platforms, and that NVIDIA compute will not be required to build on or deploy through it. TechCrunch noted that NVIDIA has released more than 500 models and 250 open datasets on Hugging Face, and that an open ecosystem it controls could be shaped to suit its chips. Hugging Face was founded in 2016 and has raised over $395 million, with its last round of $235 million in 2023. The Register reported the deal is expected to close next year pending regulators and argued in an opinion piece that regulators should block it, comparing the purchase to an automaker buying the primary means of fuel distribution. NVIDIA also filed a Form 8-K with the SEC reporting an event dated September 2, 2026.