Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $12.93bn

Nvidia announced a definitive agreement to acquire Hugging Face, the company whose platform has become the default hub for sharing open-weight AI models, for about $12.93bn — roughly $11.9bn in cash plus up to $1bn in equity to retain staff. It is Nvidia’s second-largest acquisition on record. The deal, disclosed in a securities filing dated 2 September and announced the next day, is expected to close in the first half of 2027 subject to regulatory approval.

Hugging Face hosts more than three million models, half a million datasets and a million applications used by over 18 million developers. Chief executive Jensen Huang said the platform “will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem” and that “Nvidia compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face” — an attempt to pre-empt the obvious concern that the dominant AI-chip maker taking control of the most widely used model marketplace could tilt the open ecosystem toward its own hardware. The pairing extends Nvidia’s reach from silicon up through the layer where most open models are distributed, and reporting flagged likely antitrust scrutiny given Hugging Face’s central position.

The acquisition also draws in a company that spent the summer at the centre of an AI-safety story: Hugging Face was the target of the autonomous-agent breach disclosed in July, in which an OpenAI research model compromised its infrastructure. The purchase had been reported as a rumour in late August before the two companies confirmed it.