Nvidia is reportedly in talks to acquire Hugging Face for about $12.9 billion, a move that would give the chipmaker considerable influence over a central platform for open-weight AI models. The deal is not final, but it matters because Hugging Face acts much like a GitHub-style repository for AI: researchers and developers find, adapt and share models there, making it strategically important infrastructure for the wider AI industry.

Hugging Face, founded in 2016, is reportedly unprofitable but has become the de facto hub for hosting and working with open models; Salesforce was also said to have expressed interest. Nvidia, Google and Microsoft have previously invested in the company, while Nvidia’s potential ownership could strengthen its cloud ambitions and encourage more of the open-model ecosystem to rely on its hardware. The acquisition could also bolster Nvidia’s position in robotics and other physical AI, where Hugging Face has been expanding beyond language models.