Nvidia will acquire Hugging Face for $12.93 billion

Nvidia announced on September 3, 2026 that it has agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.93 billion: about $11.9 billion paid to Hugging Face's shareholders plus an equity-based retention program worth up to $1 billion for employees who join Nvidia, per the companies' SEC filing on the deal. It's one of the largest acquisitions in Nvidia's history, and it gives the industry's dominant AI chipmaker ownership of the site 18 million developers use to share open models, datasets, and applications.

The neutrality promise

In his announcement, CEO Jensen Huang wrote that "Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem," and that Nvidia compute won't be required to build on or deploy through it. Developers keep their choice of model, framework, cloud, and hardware. Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue framed the deal around scale, saying the platform "needs more compute, more support, more collaboration, and more visibility" to grow further. The transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2027, pending regulatory approval.

The earlier offer

Nvidia tried to buy into Hugging Face once before: a roughly $500 million investment proposal in late 2023 that would have valued the company at $7 billion. Per Financial Times reporting cited by TechCrunch, Hugging Face turned it down because it didn't want a single investor with outsized influence over its direction. A minority investment and an acquisition are different structures, but the number moved from a $7 billion valuation to a $12.93 billion purchase price in under three years. A full sale settles the influence question the 2023 offer raised, in the direction Hugging Face was worried about.

The test is the neutrality promise. What an organization's AI spend buys depends on which models and platforms people reach for, and much of the open-model tooling behind that choice now sits on the balance sheet of the dominant compute vendor. Nvidia has an obvious incentive to nudge the ecosystem toward its own hardware over time, even while promising not to require it today. Check the promise against what Hugging Face does over the next few years.