European Investor
03 Sep 2026, 14:35
NVIDIA to Acquire Hugging Face for $12.93 Billion, Expanding Its Reach Across the AI Ecosystem
NVIDIA has agreed to acquire Hugging Face for approximately $12.93 billion, bringing one of the world’s largest open artificial intelligence developer platforms under the AI chip leader as it expands its influence beyond computing hardware and deeper into the software and model ecosystem.
Hugging Face has become a central hub for open-source and open-weight AI development. According to NVIDIA, more than 18 million developers, researchers and creators use the platform, which hosts over 3 million models, 500,000 datasets and 1 million applications. More than 200,000 companies use Hugging Face to discover, evaluate, customize and deploy AI models.
Importantly, NVIDIA said Hugging Face will remain an open platform rather than becoming tied exclusively to NVIDIA hardware. Developers will continue to be able to choose their preferred models, frameworks, cloud providers, inference services and computing platforms, and NVIDIA compute will not be required to use Hugging Face. The platform will also continue supporting models from competing developers and multi-cloud and multi-accelerator deployments.
The acquisition could significantly expand NVIDIA’s position across the AI technology stack. NVIDIA already dominates the market for accelerators used to train and run advanced AI models, while Hugging Face provides a major distribution and collaboration layer connecting model developers with enterprises and researchers. NVIDIA said it has already published more than 500 models and over 250 open datasets on Hugging Face and describes itself as the platform’s largest contributor of open models and data.
NVIDIA plans to use its infrastructure, engineering capabilities and global reach to improve Hugging Face’s reliability, model evaluation, safety, inference and deployment capabilities while preserving its open ecosystem.
The $12.93 billion deal represents another major strategic expansion for NVIDIA as competition increasingly moves beyond GPUs toward complete AI platforms encompassing chips, networking, software, models and deployment. Owning Hugging Face could give NVIDIA a much broader role in how millions of developers build and deploy AI while maintaining the platform as a hardware-neutral gateway to the wider AI ecosystem.
NVIDIA has agreed to acquire Hugging Face for approximately $12.93 billion, bringing one of the world’s largest open artificial intelligence developer platforms under the AI chip leader as it expands its influence beyond computing hardware and deeper into the software and model ecosystem.
Hugging Face has become a central hub for open-source and open-weight AI development. According to NVIDIA, more than 18 million developers, researchers and creators use the platform, which hosts over 3 million models, 500,000 datasets and 1 million applications. More than 200,000 companies use Hugging Face to discover, evaluate, customize and deploy AI models.
Importantly, NVIDIA said Hugging Face will remain an open platform rather than becoming tied exclusively to NVIDIA hardware. Developers will continue to be able to choose their preferred models, frameworks, cloud providers, inference services and computing platforms, and NVIDIA compute will not be required to use Hugging Face. The platform will also continue supporting models from competing developers and multi-cloud and multi-accelerator deployments.
The acquisition could significantly expand NVIDIA’s position across the AI technology stack. NVIDIA already dominates the market for accelerators used to train and run advanced AI models, while Hugging Face provides a major distribution and collaboration layer connecting model developers with enterprises and researchers. NVIDIA said it has already published more than 500 models and over 250 open datasets on Hugging Face and describes itself as the platform’s largest contributor of open models and data.
NVIDIA plans to use its infrastructure, engineering capabilities and global reach to improve Hugging Face’s reliability, model evaluation, safety, inference and deployment capabilities while preserving its open ecosystem.
The $12.93 billion deal represents another major strategic expansion for NVIDIA as competition increasingly moves beyond GPUs toward complete AI platforms encompassing chips, networking, software, models and deployment. Owning Hugging Face could give NVIDIA a much broader role in how millions of developers build and deploy AI while maintaining the platform as a hardware-neutral gateway to the wider AI ecosystem.
