Nvidia to buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion: What changes for open-source AI, rivals

6 min readNew DelhiUpdated: Sep 6, 2026 09:37 AM IST

Jensen Huang, chief executive leading U.S. chip maker Nvidia, at a Trump administration summit titled “Winning the AI Race,” in Washington, July 23, 2025. (Kenny Holston/The New York Times)

Nvidia has agreed to buy open-source AI repository Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, a move that underscores the chip giant’s growing AI power across the industry and is likely to raise eyebrows among rivals and regulators.

Following initial reports of a deal, Nvidia on Thursday, September 3, confirmed that it has entered into a formal agreement to acquire Hugging Face. The platform has emerged as one of the most popular hubs for open-weight AI models, hosting over three million of them along with other tools and datasets.

Hugging Face was officially last valued at $4.5 billion, on the heels of a funding round in 2023 that Nvidia participated in, according to a report by Financial Times.  The acquisition could help Hugging Face boost its current user base of 18 million developers to 100 million.

It also gives the platform access to significant enterprise distribution through Nvidia, particularly to address private and sovereign AI priorities of CIOs [Chief Information Officers]. More than 200,000 companies already use the platform to discover, evaluate, customise and deploy AI models.

Nvidia, meanwhile, has turned its early AI success into a potentially lasting role as kingmaker in the sector. The deal could give the trillion-dollar company greater influence over which chips developers use, although Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has said the company will not use the acquisition that way.

“Hugging Face will continue to support open source and open weight models from across the ecosystem, from every model builder. It will continue to support multi-cloud and multi-accelerator development and deployment, so builders can use the hardware and infrastructure that best fit their work,” Huang said in a blog post on Thursday.