Nvidia has confirmed a $13 billion acquisition deal to purchase open-weight AI platform Hugging Face as part of its broader open-source ecosystem expansion.
SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Nvidia Corp. confirmed Thursday that it has agreed to acquire Hugging Face, one of the world’s most widely used platforms for sharing and deploying open-source artificial intelligence models, in a transaction valued at approximately $13 billion. The deal extends the chipmaker’s strategic expansion into the AI software and model ecosystem.
According to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing, Nvidia signed a definitive agreement to acquire Hugging Face on Sept. 2. The transaction carries an approximate $11.9 billion purchase price payable to Hugging Face stockholders, subject to adjustments, alongside an equity-based retention program worth up to $1.0 billion for employees transitioning to Nvidia. While the total deal value has been widely reported at $12.93 billion, the acquisition is slated to close in the first half of 2027, pending regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions.
Hugging Face operates a platform and community dedicated to developing, sharing, and deploying open-source models, datasets, and applications. Nvidia reports that over 18 million developers, researchers, and creators currently use the platform to share more than 3 million models, while over 200,000 companies rely on it to discover and deploy AI tools. Additionally, the platform hosts approximately 500,000 datasets and 1 million applications, according to figures cited by TechCrunch.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang framed the acquisition as an extension of the company’s broader commitment to keeping AI development open and accessible, rather than an effort to restrict how developers use the platform. “Together, we will scale Hugging Face’s platform, strengthen its infrastructure and expand access to AI for developers and institutions worldwide,” Huang wrote in a statement announcing the deal. He emphasized that Nvidia intends to preserve Hugging Face’s open, vendor-neutral character, addressing concerns that the acquisition might steer developers exclusively toward Nvidia hardware. “Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem,” Huang said. “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.”
Nvidia’s SEC filing reinforced this commitment in formal terms, stating the company will keep Hugging Face’s platform open “consistent with Hugging Face’s existing practices.” Under this arrangement, the platform will continue to allow model creators, developers, and users to upload and download models and datasets of their choice, while maintaining support for hardware from silicon vendors beyond Nvidia. Huang also highlighted Nvidia’s existing contributions to the platform as evidence of its long-standing support for open AI development. Nvidia has released more than 500 models and 250 open datasets through Hugging Face, making it the largest single contributor of open models and data to the platform to date.
During a post-announcement call covered by Yahoo Finance, Nvidia enterprise computing general manager Justin Boitano outlined the strategic rationale behind the deal, underscoring the company’s conviction that open-model ecosystems remain critical to the broader AI industry’s development.
The transaction follows an earlier attempt by Nvidia to acquire Hugging Face roughly a year ago. According to the Financial Times, Hugging Face rejected an initial offer valued at approximately $500 million to preserve its independence as a standalone company. More recently, The Information reported that Hugging Face was generating roughly $150 million in annualized revenue. In a July interview with TechCrunch, co-founder and CEO Clément Delangue noted that the platform’s growth rate was driving it “close to profitability” even prior to the Nvidia deal’s finalization.
Huang has been a vocal advocate for open-weight AI models over the past year, notably publishing an essay in July that framed open models as a strategic asset for the United States amid its broader AI competition with nations such as China. He has consistently argued that the global adoption of open-weight models developed and hosted on platforms like Hugging Face bolsters American technological influence within the international AI ecosystem—a stance he reiterated during Thursday’s announcement.
Thursday’s acquisition builds on a series of recent moves by Nvidia to solidify its position across the broader AI technology stack, expanding well beyond its core semiconductor business. Last month, The Wall Street Journal reported that Nvidia finalized a $6 billion deal with coding startup Poolside to accelerate the development of open AI models. During its latest earnings call, Nvidia disclosed investments exceeding $50 billion across various AI infrastructure and ecosystem partnerships. Separately, the company has pledged to collaborate with multiple Wall Street investment firms to deploy over $500 billion in third-party capital toward the global expansion of AI infrastructure.
Market reaction to the confirmation was modestly positive, with Nvidia shares rising nearly 2% during the first hour of Thursday’s trading session, according to Yahoo Finance. Post-announcement analyst commentary described the valuation as a relatively modest outlay given Nvidia’s financial scale. Speaking to Yahoo Finance, analyst Doran noted that Nvidia’s free cash flow is projected to approach $200 billion for fiscal year 2027, describing the roughly $13 billion purchase price as “not a big bite” against the company’s broader balance sheet.
The same analyst suggested the acquisition reflects Nvidia’s strategy to diversify its revenue streams ahead of an eventual moderation in chip demand growth, despite current demand for its core hardware remaining exceptionally strong. “Right now, chip … demand is huge, but they are positioning themselves for the day when that will slow down,” the analyst told Yahoo Finance, adding that while such a downturn “still looks like it's far in the future,” it “will happen at some point.”
The Hugging Face acquisition follows Nvidia’s participation earlier this week at the G20 Innovation Ministerial in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where Huang and other technology executives discussed the broader economic implications and infrastructure demands of AI. With the transaction now confirmed and targeted for closure in the first half of 2027, Nvidia’s decision to bring one of the industry’s most prominent open-source platforms under its umbrella stands as one of its most significant acquisitions to date. The move further cements the company’s growing influence across both the hardware and software layers of the global AI ecosystem.