Nvidia has agreed to acquire the artificial intelligence developer platform Hugging Face for approximately $12.93 billion . The acquisition, announced by Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang on September 3, 2026, ranks among the chipmaker’s largest-ever deals .
Under the terms of the agreement, Nvidia will pay roughly $11.9 billion to Hugging Face investors and provide an equity-based retention program of up to $1 billion for employees who join the company . The acquisition is expected to close in the first half of 2027, pending regulatory approval .
The Platform and Its Community
Hugging Face is a central hub for open-source AI development, used by more than 18 million developers, researchers, and creators . The platform hosts over 3 million models, 500,000 datasets, and 1 million applications, with more than 200,000 companies utilizing it to discover, evaluate, and deploy AI . The startup was founded in 2016 by French entrepreneurs Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf .
Nvidia’s Commitment to Openness
In a blog post and on social media, Huang emphasized that Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem . ‘NVIDIA compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face,’ Huang stated . He added that the platform will continue to support open-source and open-weight models from various developers, as well as multi-cloud and multi-accelerator technologies . Huang described the acquisition as an ‘exciting day’ for both companies, writing on X, ‘Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty’ .
Strategic Rationale
The acquisition represents Nvidia’s latest move to extend its influence from chip manufacturing into the broader AI software ecosystem . The price tag represents a significant jump from Hugging Face’s $4.5 billion valuation in its last funding round in August 2023 . Analysts view the deal as a strategic investment in influence and reach rather than a move driven by near-term profit .
Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue said he pursued the deal after realizing that open-source AI needed more resources and scale . ‘Nvidia is going to be a great home for Hugging Face, its community and the future of open models,’ Huang wrote .
