Published: September 5, 2026 | Category: Deals & M&A

Chipmaker moves past hardware to own the hub where 18m developers build open models, promising to keep the platform vendor-neutral.

Nvidia has agreed to acquire Hugging Face, the developer platform for open-source artificial intelligence, for $12.93bn, its largest software deal and its most direct move yet into the layer of the AI market above its chips. Chief executive Jensen Huang confirmed the purchase on Wednesday in a company blog post and a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, ending weeks of speculation about a tie-up.

Hugging Face has become the default place developers go to share and test AI models. Its platform hosts three million models, one million applications used by more than 18 million developers, and half a million datasets, according to figures Nvidia disclosed alongside the deal. The companies expect the transaction to close in the first half of 2027, subject to regulatory approval.

The acquisition extends Nvidia beyond the graphics processors that have made it the most valuable company in the industry and into the software and community that sit on top of them. For a business whose chips already dominate AI training and inference, owning the distribution point for open models gives it a platform tuned to its own hardware and a route to sell spare compute capacity bundled with Hugging Face’s services.

Huang used the announcement to pre-empt concern that Nvidia would steer the platform toward its own products. “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,” he said. Nvidia has released more than 500 models and 250 open datasets on the platform.

Founded in 2016, Hugging Face established itself as the counterweight to the closed, proprietary systems sold by OpenAI and Anthropic, hosting open-weight models whose parameters anyone can download and modify. The company had raised more than $395m in venture funding, according to Crunchbase, most recently a $235m round in 2023 led by Salesforce Ventures that valued it at about $4.5bn. Backers over the years included Google, Amazon, IBM and Nvidia itself.

The price marks a steep step up from that last private valuation, and from the roughly $150m in annualized revenue The Information reported the company was generating last month. Hugging Face had rebuffed Nvidia before: the Financial Times reported it turned down a $500m approach last year.

Clem Delangue, Hugging Face’s co-founder and chief executive, framed the sale as a way to scale open-source AI rather than an exit from it. Writing on X, he said the community had shown the platform could be an alternative to closed APIs, but that reaching a larger scale “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.”

Whether Nvidia can keep an ostensibly neutral platform neutral while owning it will now be the question for the developers who depend on it, and for the regulators who must clear a deal that hands the industry’s dominant hardware supplier its main open-model marketplace.

Sources