Nvidia has agreed to buy open-source AI platform Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, adding the industry's main model repository to its hardware business.
Key Points:
- Nvidia will pay roughly $12.9 billion for Hugging Face, the repository where developers publish, download and test open-weight AI models.
- Jensen Huang says the platform stays open to the entire AI ecosystem, while Clement Delangue says his company started the talks over the summer.
- The deal ranks as Nvidia's second largest, trailing only the $20 billion it paid for Groq assets late last year.
Nvidia Hugging Face Deal Terms
Jensen Huang announced the agreement in a blog post on Thursday morning, confirming takeover reports that had circulated in the trade press for roughly a week.
The deal ranks as Nvidia's second largest, behind the $20 billion it paid late last year for assets from chip startup Groq.
Nvidia already held a stake in Hugging Face, having joined a 2023 funding round that also drew Google, Amazon, Salesforce, Intel and Qualcomm.
Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem, Huang wrote, promising to scale its infrastructure and widen access for developers and institutions worldwide. Clément Delangue, the platform's chief executive, said his company approached Huang over the summer.
Separate reporting valued the transaction at about $13 billion. Neither side detailed the payment structure. Hugging Face opened in 2016 as a chatbot app aimed at teenagers, then pivoted into open machine learning tools and grew into a public model registry.
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Open Models Versus Closed Rivals
Developers use Hugging Face to share, discover and test AI models, and the site became the central hub for open-source releases after the generative AI boom began in 2022. Roughly 13 million of them now build there, which hands Nvidia a foothold in the software layer sitting directly above the chips it already dominates in AI data centers.
Analysts expect open-weight systems to keep gaining ground alongside the proprietary frontier models built by OpenAI, Anthropic and Google.
Delangue has been among the loudest voices making that case, and last month he argued that China was winning the AI race through its embrace of open releases. Huang has taken a similar line in Washington.
In July, he and other technology executives urged lawmakers to avoid premature restrictions on open-weight models, warning that such rules could stifle competition or push innovation overseas.
Weeks later a rogue model traced to OpenAI breached Hugging Face systems, and Delangue blamed engineering mistakes for the lapse rather than any flaw in open source.
Hugging Face Valuation History
The agreed price marks a steep climb for a company valued at $4.5 billion in 2023, when its corporate backers put $235 million into a Series D round. Annualized revenue sits near $150 million, a sliver of the $96.2 billion Nvidia booked last quarter. Earlier this year Hugging Face rejected a $500 million Nvidia investment at a $7 billion valuation.
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