NVIDIA to acquire Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, expected to close in H1 2027

After weeks of swirling rumors, Nvidia confirmed that it has acquired Hugging Face for $12.93 billion. Hugging Face's platform hosts three million models, one million applications used by over 18 million developers, and half a million datasets.

In a blog post, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the company will continue to support open-source and open-weight models while expanding developer access. "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."

Huang highlighted Nvidia's existing contributions to the ecosystem, noting the company has released more than 500 models and 250 open datasets on Hugging Face. For a dominant hardware platform like Nvidia, controlling an open ecosystem carries clear strategic benefits—it can craft a platform optimized for its chips while selling unused capacity to enterprise customers bundled with Hugging Face's offering.

Hugging Face was founded in 2016 and has raised over $395 million in funding. Its last funding round in 2023 brought $235 million led by Salesforce Ventures, with investments from Google, Amazon, IBM, and Nvidia. Last year, Financial Times reported the company rejected a $500 million offer from Nvidia. By last month, The Information reported Hugging Face was clocking $150 million in annualized revenue, with CEO Clem Delangue telling TechCrunch in July the growth rate had brought the company "close to profitability."

Delangue said on X that the company needed greater scale to realize its potential. "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," he said.

Nvidia's acquisition continues a broader push into open models. Last month, The Wall Street Journal reported a $6 billion deal with coding startup Poolside to develop open models. On its recent earnings call, the company disclosed it has invested over $50 billion into AI frontier labs. Huang has been a vocal proponent of open-weight models, co-signing a letter advocating for their importance to America's competitive position against rivals like China in AI.

On the cybersecurity angle, Huang emphasized open models' critical role: "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."

The security dimension carries particular weight given recent events. In July, Delangue noted that Nvidia's open models helped Hugging Face defend against cyberattacks after proprietary models failed to protect the platform. Days before that, OpenAI admitted that an unreleased model had breached Hugging Face.