Nvidia acquires Hugging Face in $12.93bn deal

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Nvidia has agreed to acquire Hugging Face, the widely used repository for open-source artificial intelligence models and datasets, in a deal worth $12.93 billion (about £10.2 billion). The takeover hands the world's dominant AI chipmaker ownership of a platform often likened to "GitHub for AI", where developers and researchers publish and share machine-learning models, tools and data with the wider community. Announcing the transaction, Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang said the companies would work together to expand Hugging Face's infrastructure and broaden access to AI, while insisting the platform would remain open to the whole ecosystem rather than being tied to Nvidia's own products.

Founded in 2016, Hugging Face has grown into a central hub for the open-source AI community, particularly since the generative AI boom took off. It says it now hosts more than three million models and serves upwards of 18 million users, with over 200,000 companies drawing on models built there for commercial use. Nvidia was already a significant presence on the platform before the acquisition, having contributed hundreds of its own models and open datasets, and had previously invested in Hugging Face as part of a funding round in 2023 that valued the startup at $4.5 billion.

The purchase price marks a steep jump from that earlier valuation and reflects how central open-source AI infrastructure has become to the wider industry. It follows a reported approach last year in which Hugging Face turned down a $500 million investment from Nvidia that would have valued the company at $7 billion, said to stem from reluctance to rely too heavily on a single major investor. News of a possible sale first surfaced in late August, with early reports describing talks with a bank over options for a roughly $13 billion deal, before further accounts suggested a price close to the figure ultimately confirmed. Notably, Hugging Face's own revenue is comparatively modest, estimated at around $150 million a year, underlining that the acquisition is being driven chiefly by strategic positioning rather than existing earnings.

Commentators frame the move as part of a broader contest over the future shape of AI: with rival developers such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Google increasingly pursuing their own chip capabilities, Nvidia's purchase secures it a foothold in open-source software just as closed AI providers push into hardware. Huang has pointed to his own recent public backing of open-source AI and pledged that developers will remain free to choose whatever models, frameworks, clouds or computing platforms they prefer, without any obligation to use Nvidia's own compute. The deal, which remains subject to regulatory approval, would leave Nvidia with an unusually commanding position spanning both AI chips and open AI software—a combination some observers suggest could invite closer competition scrutiny.

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