Nvidia reportedly agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, potentially taking control of an open-source AI hub with 13 million users and 3 million models.
Key Points:
- The Information reported that the companies reached an acquisition agreement valued at $12.9 billion.
- Hugging Face has grown into a major distribution hub for open AI models, datasets and development tools.
- Neither company has publicly announced the transaction, so the reported terms still await formal confirmation.
Nvidia Acquisition
The Information reported Aug. 27 that Nvidia had agreed to acquire Hugging Face, citing a source familiar with the matter, after earlier reports placed a possible deal near $13 billion. Neither company has announced the acquisition.
Hugging Face began in 2016 as a chatbot app before shifting toward machine learning and open-source development. The platform said it reached 13 million users and more than 500,000 public datasets in 2025, while its model repository passed 3 million entries in Aug. 2026.
The $12.9 billion price would be nearly three times Hugging Face’s $4.5 billion valuation from its 2023 Series D round, in which Nvidia participated. A purchase would place one of the largest open-model repositories under the same company that supplies much of the computing hardware used to train and run AI systems.
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Ruben Roy Analysis
Stifel analyst Ruben Roy said the reported acquisition fits Nvidia’s broader push into open AI and could deepen the company’s influence beyond chips through software and development infrastructure. Nvidia reported $96.2 billion in fiscal second-quarter revenue, giving it substantial capacity to fund acquisitions and investments.
Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf declined to discuss a possible Nvidia sale in a Bloomberg interview but said the company had “always had a lot of interest.”
The platform’s neutrality could become a key issue because developers use it across competing hardware, model families and cloud services.
Nvidia has steadily expanded its relationship with Hugging Face. It joined the startup’s $235 million funding round in 2023, then later offered a $500 million investment that would have valued the company at $7 billion, an offer Hugging Face rejected. The reported $12.9 billion acquisition would mark a much larger step from investor and partner to owner.
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