GoKawiilUpdate (September 3): Nvidia has now confirmed that it will acquire Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, turning last week's reports into one of the chipmaker's largest deals ever. The deal includes up to $1 billion in equity incentives to retain Hugging Face employees and comes after the AI platform reportedly rebuffed an Nvidia investment last year as it sought to preserve its independence.
That question of neutrality is now front and center: Nvidia says Hugging Face will continue supporting competing models, clouds, frameworks, and accelerators, and developers will not need Nvidia hardware to use the platform. Hugging Face currently hosts more than 3 million models and serves over 18 million developers, giving Nvidia ownership of one of the most important distribution and collaboration hubs in the open AI ecosystem.
Nvidia is reportedly close to buying Hugging Face for a staggering $12.9 billion. If completed, the transaction would put the main supplier of AI processors in control of the platform that has become one of the most important hubs for sharing open AI models and supporting developer collaboration.
The Information reports that Nvidia has agreed to the purchase, citing one person with knowledge of the agreement. A separate Business Insider report is less definitive, saying the companies held serious talks at a valuation above $13 billion but had not signed an agreement. Neither Nvidia nor Hugging Face has publicly confirmed the reports.
If it does close at the stated price, Hugging Face would become Nvidia's largest completed takeover, surpassing the $7 billion it paid for Mellanox in 2020.
The startup is often described as the GitHub of AI, providing a central hub where developers publish, discover, test, and deploy models and datasets. Hugging Face says its community reached 13 million users, more than two million public models, and over 500,000 public datasets in 2025.
The Information says Hugging Face recently generated about $150 million in annualized revenue, putting the reported price at roughly 86 times that figure. Its previous funding round raised $235 million at a $4.5 billion valuation in 2023, with Nvidia joining Salesforce, Google, Amazon, AMD, Intel, Qualcomm, and IBM as investors.
Nvidia and Hugging Face have a history of collaboration. There was their 2023 partnership that connected Hugging Face models to Nvidia's DGX Cloud for training and fine-tuning. The pair later expanded into on-demand training clusters. Hugging Face also works with AMD, AWS, and Google, making platform neutrality a concern if the AI industry's dominant chip supplier becomes its new owner.
– Jensen Huang (@JensenHuang) July 24, 2026
Buying Hugging Face could give Nvidia greater influence over how developers find, share, optimize, and deploy AI models. The move also aligns with Jensen Huang's public support for open models. Nvidia's CEO believes wider access encourages AI adoption and ultimately creates more demand for chips and data centers. Nvidia and Hugging Face also signed the same industry letter urging US policymakers to keep advanced model weights accessible. The company can certainly afford the deal, having just reported $96.2 billion in quarterly revenue and $59.7 billion in net income."
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