NVIDIA is acquiring Hugging Face for $12.9 billion.
The deal keeps Hugging Face an open platform for AI developers.
NVIDIA says its compute will not be required to use it.
What happened
NVIDIA Corp. today said it is acquiring Hugging Face Inc., an open platform for AI developers, for $12.9 billion. Hugging Face was founded in 2016 and is based in Brooklyn, N.Y.
Why it matters
The deal is meant to keep Hugging Face an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang stated that NVIDIA compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face, and that the platform will continue to support open-source and open-weight models from every model builder.
What to watch
Hugging Face has more than 18 million developers, researchers, and creators, and over 200,000 companies use the platform. More than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets, and 1 million applications are shared on Hugging Face. The founding team said it expects to stay after the acquisition.
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NVIDIA's acquisition of Hugging Face follows years of collaboration between the two companies on AI and robotics development. In July, they added NVIDIA Isaac GR00T 1.7 and the NVIDIA Isaac Teleop framework to the LeRobot open-source library. Earlier, in May 2026, Hugging Face launched an agentic AI toolkit for its Reachy Mini desktop platform.
Delangue explained that open-source AI needs more compute, support, collaboration, and visibility to scale, which led to discussions with NVIDIA. He also noted that an OpenAI cybersecurity experiment attack on Hugging Face showed the importance of open-source, as open models were used to defend against the incident.
The acquisition could help NVIDIA ensure demand for its AI processors and architecture by supporting the open-source community. It could also help Hugging Face, which has raised $400 million, compete in the AI infrastructure market, according to TechCrunch. NVIDIA's recent quarterly revenue was $96 billion, doubling year over year.
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Nvidia has agreed to acquire Hugging Face, the go-to platform for open AI models
