NVIDIA leadership reaffirmed its commitment to maintaining Hugging Face as an open ecosystem platform rather than pursuing full vertical integration.

Nvidia has officially acquired artificial intelligence resource repository Hugging Face in a $12.9 billion deal centered on open-source models. The platform, which hosts more than 3 million open models, will now operate under Nvidia’s management. According to the company’s announcement, over 200,000 organizations rely on Hugging Face for AI deployment, and Nvidia has pledged to maintain the platform’s open architecture.

“Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang wrote in a blog post. “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.”

Hugging Face has long been central to the global open-model community, but it gained widespread attention in July after OpenAI acknowledged that its autonomous agents had breached the repository’s systems. The breach highlighted the practical value of open-source models when Hugging Face noted it had to deploy a Chinese open-source model to counter the attack, as proprietary closed models were blocked by cybersecurity restrictions. The incident prompted broad support for open models across Silicon Valley, with Nvidia emerging as a leading advocate. Nvidia has consistently framed open models as essential to maintaining American leadership in global AI.

As U.S. AI providers increasingly pivot toward closed models, Chinese laboratories such as DeepSeek and Moonshot have established a dominant foothold in the open-model space. Huang has warned that this shift poses strategic risks to the American AI industry, arguing that global dependence on Chinese open models could eventually translate into reliance on Chinese AI hardware. These concerns appear to reflect the strategic direction Nvidia’s leadership has chosen for the company.

While Nvidia remains the undisputed leader in AI hardware, it is actively working to solidify its position in software. Late last year, the company launched its latest suite of open models, signaling a renewed commitment to expanding its footprint in the open-source arena. By dominating both hardware and open models, Nvidia aims to ensure that the most seamless path for developers building on open architectures is to keep their work within Nvidia’s ecosystem and run it on its own chips. This strategy is particularly critical as many of Nvidia’s top customers developing frontier closed models—including OpenAI and Google—are designing their own custom silicon, effectively positioning themselves as future competitors.

Hugging Face’s extensive developer network aligns closely with this objective. Earlier this year, Nvidia proposed a $500 million investment in the platform, but Hugging Face declined. According to the Financial Times, the company stated it did not want a single dominant investor influencing its strategic decisions. However, Hugging Face’s stance shifted rapidly. Early last month, reports indicated the platform was seeking an acquisition, followed by coverage from The Information confirming that Nvidia had emerged as the buyer.

When Nvidia’s initial investment proposal was rejected in January, the Financial Times valued Hugging Face at approximately $7 billion. The eventual $12.9 billion sale price, reached roughly eight months later, makes this Nvidia’s second-largest acquisition to date, trailing only its $20 billion purchase of AI inference chip startup Groq in December. (Groq should not be confused with Elon Musk’s Grok.)

Nvidia executives previously told the Financial Times that Hugging Face’s primary strength lies in its perceived neutrality. Acquiring the platform through a major industry player with significant market stakes could understandably raise concerns among developers who value that independence. Nevertheless, Huang reiterated his commitment to preserving Hugging Face’s open ethos.

“Together, we will scale Hugging Face’s platform, strengthen its infrastructure and expand access to AI for developers and institutions worldwide,” Huang said. “NVIDIA’s infrastructure, engineering and global reach can help improve platform reliability, safety, model evaluation, inference and deployment capabilities, while preserving the open ecosystem that made Hugging Face foundational.”