NVIDIA acquires AI startup Hugging Face for USD 12.9 billion

Technology giant NVIDIA has agreed to acquire artificial intelligence platform Hugging Face in a deal valued at about $12.93 billion, marking one of the chipmaker’s biggest moves to expand its influence beyond AI hardware and deeper into the global developer ecosystem. NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang announced the agreement on Thursday, saying the companies would work together to scale Hugging Face’s platform, strengthen its infrastructure and expand access to artificial intelligence for developers and institutions worldwide.

Under the transaction, approximately $11.9 billion will be paid to Hugging Face shareholders, subject to adjustments, while NVIDIA will establish an equity-based retention programme worth up to about $1 billion for Hugging Face employees joining the company. The acquisition is expected to close in the first half of 2027, subject to regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions.

Major open AI platform

Founded in 2016 by French entrepreneurs Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf, New York-based Hugging Face has emerged as one of the most important platforms for developers building and sharing open artificial intelligence models.

More than 18 million developers, researchers and creators use the platform, which hosts over three million models, 500,000 datasets and one million applications. More than 200,000 companies use Hugging Face to discover, evaluate, customise and deploy artificial intelligence.

Huang described the company as a “vibrant home for the open model developer community” and stressed that the acquisition would not turn the platform into an NVIDIA-exclusive ecosystem.

“Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem,” Huang said, adding that developers would continue to be able to choose their models, frameworks, cloud providers, inference services and computing platforms.

NVIDIA hardware will not be mandatory for developers building or deploying through Hugging Face.

Platform to remain open

Hugging Face will continue supporting open-source and open-weight models from developers across the AI industry, including models designed to run on computing hardware produced by NVIDIA’s rivals.

NVIDIA said keeping the platform open would give developers and organisations greater freedom to choose models suited to individual requirements rather than relying entirely on proprietary AI systems.

Huang said open models allow startups, businesses, universities and public institutions to access advanced capabilities without having to train every model from scratch.

The deal significantly expands NVIDIA’s presence in the software and AI-development ecosystem at a time when the company is already the dominant supplier of processors used to train and run artificial intelligence systems.

The acquisition would give NVIDIA direct exposure to a vast community of AI developers while allowing Hugging Face to tap the chip giant’s financial and computing resources to expand its infrastructure.

Huang said the combination would help make artificial intelligence “more open, more capable and more accessible” to people and institutions worldwide.