엔비디아는 개발자 생태계를 하드웨어 스택에 직접 통합하기 위해 오픈소스 AI 모델 저장소 허깅페이스를 129억 3천만 달러에 인수한다고 공식 확인했다.
NVIDIA has agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12,930,300,000, structured as approximately $11.9 billion in cash for stockholders and up to approximately $1 billion in equity-based employee retention. CEO Jensen Huang announced the definitive agreement on September 3, confirming that the transaction was formally entered into on September 2. The acquisition is projected to close in the first half of 2027, pending customary closing conditions and regulatory approvals.
The deal significantly expands NVIDIA’s footprint in open-source and open-weight artificial intelligence. Hugging Face currently serves more than 18 million developers, researchers, and creators, hosting over 3 million models, 500,000 datasets, and 1 million applications. Additionally, more than 200,000 enterprises utilize the platform. NVIDIA and Hugging Face have previously collaborated on open AI models and datasets. Huang said NVIDIA is the largest contributor of open models and data to Hugging Face, with more than 500 models and 250 open datasets published on the platform.
To address concerns regarding market concentration, NVIDIA has committed to maintaining Hugging Face as an open platform post-acquisition. Developers will retain full autonomy to select their preferred models, frameworks, cloud providers, inference services, and computing platforms. NVIDIA explicitly stated that its own compute resources will not be required to build or deploy through Hugging Face. The company will continue supporting open-source and open-weight models from independent builders while preserving multi-cloud and multi-accelerator development and deployment capabilities. These structural commitments are integral to the deal, ensuring the platform’s ecosystem remains compatible with diverse hardware and infrastructure providers while gaining access to NVIDIA’s additional engineering and infrastructure resources.
The acquisition carries notable implications for decentralized artificial intelligence (DeAI). Blockchain-based AI networks such as Bittensor (TAO) leverage Hugging Face to distribute AI development and infrastructure across decentralized networks rather than relying solely on centralized providers. While Hugging Face operates as a centralized hub for uploading, sharing, evaluating, and deploying models, datasets, and applications, NVIDIA’s ownership places a major open-model repository under one of the industry’s largest infrastructure firms. This dynamic raises broader sector questions regarding how much of the AI development stack should remain concentrated within individual corporations versus distributed among developers, infrastructure providers, and communities. In response, Huang said open models can broaden access to AI and help distribute AI development across companies, institutions and communities.
The transaction follows NVIDIA’s recent strategic expansion into adjacent infrastructure sectors. The company recently backed a $35 billion cloud computing agreement utilizing capacity at a Texas data center constructed by former Bitcoin miner Hut 8, reflecting a broader industry pivot toward AI infrastructure. The Crypto Times previously reported on the NVIDIA-backed agreement and its connection to Hut 8’s transition from Bitcoin mining infrastructure toward AI data-center capacity. By integrating Hugging Face, NVIDIA deepens its presence across the software, model, and developer ecosystems alongside its existing hardware and compute business.
The announcement also arrives in the wake of a July security incident at Hugging Face involving an autonomous AI agent system. The company disclosed that the breach granted unauthorized access to a limited set of internal datasets and several service credentials. Hugging Face confirmed there was no evidence of tampering with public, user-facing models, datasets, or Spaces, and verified that its software supply chain remained secure. The intrusion originated from vulnerabilities in the dataset-processing pipeline, where an autonomous agent framework executed thousands of actions across short-lived sandboxes. Hugging Face subsequently patched the vulnerabilities, rebuilt affected infrastructure, and rotated compromised credentials. While the incident underscores the security complexities inherent to platforms hosting AI development tools, NVIDIA has not linked the breach to the acquisition terms.
With the transaction agreed but not yet closed, regulatory scrutiny will play a decisive role in shaping the outcome. As outlined in the SEC filing, compliance requirements could necessitate modifications to the models or datasets available through Hugging Face, potentially altering the platform’s architecture and affecting the anticipated synergies of the deal. For developers and the open-source AI community, NVIDIA’s binding commitments to platform openness will be closely monitored throughout the regulatory review process as both parties work toward closing.
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