Nvidia has agreed to acquire Hugging Face, the hosting platform where the open-model AI community shares its work, for $12,930,300,000. Chief executive Jensen Huang announced the deal in a blog post on September 3, 2026. The Register reported the transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2027, subject to regulatory approval and other customary closing conditions.
Hugging Face approached Nvidia first
Hugging Face chief executive Clément Delangue told CNBC's Becky Quick on Squawk Box that his company approached Huang over the summer, "and a few weeks later, here we are."
"During the summer, I think we realized that Hugging Face and open-source AI in general was at the turning point, and that it needed more, more resources, more scale, more visibility," Delangue said. He added that Nvidia was "a perfect home" for his company and that discussions moved quickly.
Huang described the approach the same way in his announcement: "I am honored that Clem came to me as he considered the next chapter of Hugging Face and believed NVIDIA would be a great home for the company, its community and the future of open models."
What the platform carries
By Nvidia's count, more than 18 million developers, researchers and creators use Hugging Face to share more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets and 1 million applications. More than 200,000 companies use it to discover, evaluate, customize and deploy AI. Nvidia says it is already the largest single contributor of open models and data to the platform, having released more than 500 models and more than 250 open datasets there.
Hugging Face appeared on the launch roster alongside Microsoft, GitHub and Salesforce when Google published its Agentic Resource Discovery specification for finding and verifying AI capabilities across the web.
The openness commitments Nvidia made
Huang's announcement set out what Nvidia says will not change. "Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem," he wrote. "Developers will choose the models they want, the frameworks they want, the clouds and inference service providers they want and the computing platforms they want. NVIDIA compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face."
The post further commits the platform to continued support for open source and open weight models "from every model builder," and to multi-cloud and multi-accelerator development and deployment. Huang said the Hugging Face team would keep its "same iconic 🤗 brand."
Where it ranks among Nvidia's acquisitions
At $12.9 billion, this is Nvidia's second-largest acquisition on record, CNBC reported. It trails the $20 billion the company paid for assets from chipmaker Groq in December 2025. Before that, its largest deal was the purchase of Israeli chipmaker Mellanox for almost $7 billion in 2019.
SpaceX agreed to acquire Cursor parent Anysphere for $60 billion in an all-stock deal, and Nvidia itself has been expanding past the data center, entering the PC chip market with RTX Spark.
The hack that preceded the deal
Hugging Face was recently at the center of a hacking incident that raised concerns about the pace at which AI cybersecurity tools are advancing. Delangue blamed engineering mistakes for the attack and, per CNBC, said his company used an Nvidia version of a Chinese open model to resolve it. He told CNBC the breach proved the importance of open models and the need to "double down" on the proliferation of open-source AI.
Huang argued the open-source environment gives defenders what he called an "asymmetric advantage" over attackers. "When I say asymmetric capability, there are way more people who are protecting than there are people who are attacking," he said. "And so, the benefit of having the community come together with open models, so that they can collaborate all transparently with each other, gives the defenders an asymmetric advantage."
Source: NVIDIA, CNBC, The Register
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