Hugging Face CEO pledges to fight for open-source AI

Huang departs, Delangue responds

Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue called Jensen Huang's departure from Nvidia a really sad day but vowed to keep fighting for open-source AI harder than ever.

“This whole thing sucks, and I wish none of it had happened. It's a really sad day!”

The twelve point nine billion dollar deal

Nvidia announced plans to acquire Hugging Face in September for twelve point nine billion dollars, the second-largest acquisition in Nvidia's history after Groq's assets for twenty billion dollars in December twenty twenty-five.

Why Huang's exit worries advocates

Huang was known as a strong advocate for open-source AI and open-weight models. His departure raises concerns about how Nvidia will approach this space without his leadership.

Justice Department scrutiny

The U.S. Department of Justice began making inquiries about how the deal would impact competition in the AI market. Nvidia pledged the platform would preserve open support but could control a major distribution channel.

Huang's open-source advocacy

In July, Huang published an AI policy letter signed by twenty-five companies including Microsoft, Meta, Hugging Face and IBM, urging the U.S. government not to over-restrict open-weight AI models.

“Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty.”

Building the open AI ecosystem

In August, Nvidia announced a six billion dollar deal with coding startup Poolside to build out an open AI ecosystem in the U.S. to compete against Chinese companies like DeepSeek and Kimi K three.

Expanding open-weight models

Last month, Nvidia expanded its Nemotron family of open-weight models with a one hundred twenty billion parameter model for enterprise agents and two new lightweight Bolt models for personal computers.

Deal timeline and next steps

The Hugging Face acquisition is scheduled to close in the first half of twenty twenty-seven. Requests for comment on deal status and whether Hugging Face has spoken with interim CEO Collette Kress were not returned.