Nvidia will acquire Hugging Face for $12.93 billion
About $11.9 billion goes to shareholders and up to $1 billion in retention equity to employees -- Nvidia says its own compute won't be required to build on or deploy through the platform, and the deal follows a $500 million investment offer Hugging Face turned down in 2023.
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' own SEC filing on the deal. It's one of the largest acquisitions in Nvidia's history, and it hands the industry's dominant AI chipmaker ownership of the site 18 million developers use to share open models, datasets, and applications.
The promise Nvidia is making about staying neutral
In his own 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 as a scale problem, 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.
Not the first 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, which Hugging Face turned down because, per Financial Times reporting cited by TechCrunch, it didn't want a single investor with outsized influence over its direction. An acquisition is a different structure than a minority investment, but the number moved from a $7 billion valuation to a $12.93 billion purchase price in under three years -- and a full sale settles the influence question the 2023 offer raised, just not in the direction Hugging Face was originally worried about.
The real test here isn't the price, it's the neutrality promise. Merit AC's own tool-breakdown analytics exist because what an organization's AI spend actually buys depends on which models and platforms people reach for, not just the invoice total -- and a large share of the open-model tooling that kind of analysis depends on now sits inside the balance sheet of the industry's dominant compute vendor. Nvidia has an obvious incentive to nudge that ecosystem toward its own hardware over time, even while promising not to require it today. Whether the promise holds is worth checking against what Hugging Face actually does over the next few years, not assuming from a launch-day blog post.