Nvidia has agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, the chipmaker’s second-largest acquisition ever and a direct push into the open-source AI ecosystem it has spent years supplying with hardware.
The deal, disclosed in an SEC filing and a blog post from CEO Jensen Huang, includes roughly $11.9 billion payable to Hugging face shareholders and up to $1 billion in retention equity for employees joining Nvidia. It’s expected to close in the first half of 2027, pending regulatory approval.
Hugging Face has become the default hosting ground for open-source AI: More than 18 million developers use the platform to share upwards of 2 million models, 500,000 datasets, and 1 million applications, Huang wrote in the blog post published today.
Huang framed the acquisition as a commitment to keeping Hugging Face neutral rather than folding it into Nvidia’s stack. Hugging Face will “remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem,” he wrote, adding that developers will still choose their own models, frameworks, cloud, and inference providers.
“Together, we will scale Hugging Face’s platform, strengthen its infrastructure, and expand access to AI for developers and institutions worldwide,” Huang wrote.
The acquisition also lands as Nvidia’s biggest customers work to reduce their reliance on GPUs. Anthropic and OpenAI are both developing proprietary chips, and Nvidia has been striking deals across the stack to keep its footprint wide—incluidng a $20 billion listening agreement with chip startup Groq late last year.
Nvidia has tried to buy in before. The company offered $500 million for a stake in Hugging Face last year, valuing it at $7 billion—an offer Hugging Face turned down, according to the Financial Times.
