Nvidia will pay $12.93 billion to acquire Hugging Face, giving the chipmaker direct control of a widely used open-model platform. The repository hosts three million models, supports one million applications used by over 18 million developers, and stores half a million datasets, a footprint that links model development to potential deployment on Nvidia hardware.
Jensen Huang framed the purchase as compatible with Hugging Face’s open roots, promising continued access for the wider developer community. “Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem. Developers will choose the models they want, the frameworks they want, the clouds and inference service providers they want and the computing platforms they want. Nvidia compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face,” Huang wrote in a company blog post.
Huang also noted Nvidia’s existing presence on the platform, saying the company has published more than 500 models and 250 open datasets on Hugging Face. That contribution creates a direct channel from models arriving on the hub to execution on Nvidia’s chips, a strategic position for a supplier that provides much of the industry’s AI compute.
For enterprise customers, the acquisition opens the possibility of an integrated stack that pairs Hugging Face’s tools and catalog with Nvidia’s spare compute capacity. Nvidia can offer packaged compute alongside the platform, a move that could simplify procurement for corporations that need both models and the infrastructure to run them.
Hugging Face was founded in 2016 and has raised over $395 million to date. Its last funding round in 2023 brought in $235 million led by Salesforce Ventures and included participation from Google, Amazon, IBM, and Nvidia. CEO Clem Delangue thanked the community on X, calling the deal a route to scale the open model movement. “But for it to happen at [a] larger scale, it needs more compute, more support, more collaboration, and more visibility. That’s why we went to talk to Jensen, who offered to do exactly that with us,” Delangue wrote.
The company has attracted acquisition interest and recent revenue momentum. Reports say Hugging Face rebuffed a $500 million approach last year, and recent coverage put its annualized revenue at $150 million. Delangue previously told TechCrunch the platform’s growth was moving it “close to profitability.”
Nvidia has positioned itself as a public supporter of open models while investing heavily in model development and compute. The company has told investors it has infused over $50 billion into AI frontier labs and has been linked in reporting to a $6 billion deal with coding startup Poolside. Huang has also argued for open-weight standards and highlighted open models’ role in sectors such as cybersecurity. “One of the areas where frontier models are vital is cybersecurity. You see the number of cybersecurity companies that are enabled by frontier models so that they could have massively distributed, continuously running autonomous cybersecurity systems to defend. Those companies are emerging. There are some amazing companies. They couldn’t do it without open models. And so open models is both incredibly successful and have finally reached the frontier, but they’re also vital to the American economy. It’s vital to the world economy,” he said.
The companies have pointed to recent security episodes to underline the stakes: in July Delangue said an Nvidia open model helped Hugging Face repel attacks after proprietary models failed, and days earlier OpenAI acknowledged an unreleased model breached the platform. Going forward, Nvidia says it will expand developer access while keeping Hugging Face’s platform open, and markets will watch how the chipmaker integrates compute capacity with a widely used model repository.
