Nvidia buys Hugging Face for $13B

Chip giant Nvidia has agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $13 billion. The deal is Nvidia's largest acquisition ever, far surpassing its $6.9 billion Mellanox purchase in 2020.

“That is how AI can scale sustainably into billions of everyday tasks across factories, hospitals, farms, classrooms, and Main Street businesses”

The central hub for open AI

Hugging Face hosts 3 million open-weight models, 500,000 datasets, and 1 million AI applications. Over 18 million developers and 200,000 companies rely on the platform to build AI features.

Expanding beyond major tech labs

Boosting open-weight models creates broad hardware demand across startups and enterprises. This eases Nvidia's reliance on a few frontier labs like OpenAI and Anthropic, which are designing their own chips.

Pledging to keep the platform open

Nvidia insists Hugging Face will maintain its brand and remain an open platform compatible with all cloud providers and competing chips. The takeover aims to close by 2027 pending regulatory review.

“will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem”

From independent startup to acquisition

Hugging Face previously turned down Nvidia investment to preserve its independence and avoid a single dominant owner. Nvidia ultimately opted to purchase the 10-year-old startup outright.

Betting on open-source ecosystems

The deal aligns with Nvidia's policy push urging the US government to champion open AI systems over closed, proprietary models to ensure broader national AI leadership.

“AI leadership will be judged not by one frontier AI model, but by whether the United States builds a strong, open ecosystem that diffuses into every sector”