Nvidia to Acquire AI Platform Hugging Face for $12.93 Billion

Deal confirmed after weeks of speculation

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced on Thursday that the company has agreed to acquire Hugging Face, one of the best-known platforms for sharing open-source AI models, datasets and tools. The deal is valued at $12.93 billion, according to Engadget, The Verge and TechCrunch, while Wired describes it as "nearly $13 billion."

Speculation about a possible sale began in late August: on August 23, Business Insider reported that Hugging Face was working with a bank to explore a roughly $13 billion sale, and by August 27 it reported that talks with Nvidia had been underway for about a week. The Information had earlier reported that an agreement worth roughly $12.9 billion had already been reached.

What is Hugging Face

Founded in New York in 2016, Hugging Face is often described as "the GitHub of AI," letting developers share, discover and test open-source AI models. According to TechCrunch, the platform hosts three million models, half a million datasets and one million applications used by more than 18 million developers; Engadget adds that over 200,000 companies use models built on the platform.

A pledge to stay open

Huang said Hugging Face "will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem" and that developers will not be required to use Nvidia hardware to build on or deploy through it. Nvidia was already an investor and contributor to the platform, having published more than 500 models and 250 open datasets, according to Huang.

Hugging Face co-founder and CEO Clément Delangue thanked the community in a post on X, saying that scaling further would require more compute, support, collaboration and visibility — which is why the company turned to Huang.

Context and discrepancies

Hugging Face's last official valuation was $4.5 billion, set during a 2023 funding round of $235 million led by Salesforce Ventures. The Financial Times has reported that the company rejected a $500 million investment offer from Nvidia last year that would have valued it at $7 billion. Total funding raised to date is reported slightly differently across sources: TechCrunch, citing Crunchbase, puts it at over $395 million, while Wired, citing PitchBook, says nearly $400 million as of December 2025. The Information reports Hugging Face's annualized revenue at around $150 million.

The acquisition still requires regulatory approval. If completed, it would give Nvidia a dominant position in both AI hardware and open-source AI software, at a time when Huang has been vocally advocating for open-weight models, including in the context of competition with China.