NVIDIA agrees to acquire Hugging Face in a historic $12.9 billion cash transaction
The deal secures the chipmaker's control over the world's premier open-source AI model repository while pledging to maintain its platform independence.
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- NVIDIA announced on September 3, 2026, that it has entered a definitive agreement to acquire open-source AI platform Hugging Face for $12,930,300,000.
- Hugging Face hosts over 3 million models and serves more than 18 million developers, making it the central hub for the open-weights AI ecosystem.
- NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang pledged that Hugging Face will remain an open platform, supporting multi-cloud deployments and non-NVIDIA hardware accelerators.
NVIDIA announced on September 3, 2026, that it has reached a definitive agreement to acquire Hugging Face, the leading open-source and open-weights artificial intelligence repository, in an all-cash deal valued at $12,930,300,000. The acquisition represents one of the largest transactions in the history of the AI industry, cementing NVIDIA's position at the center of both AI hardware and software distribution.
Founded over a decade ago, Hugging Face has grown into the 'GitHub of AI,' hosting more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets, and 1 million applications. It serves a massive community of over 18 million active developers. By acquiring the platform, NVIDIA secures a direct relationship with the global developer base and gains deep insights into the software, weights, and architectures that developers are building and deploying.
Despite taking ownership, NVIDIA has moved quickly to ease concerns within the open-source community. CEO Jensen Huang stated that Hugging Face will remain an open, hardware-agnostic platform. Huang clarified that NVIDIA compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face, promising that the platform will continue to support alternative hardware accelerators and multi-cloud infrastructure environments.
By acquiring Hugging Face, NVIDIA moves from a hardware landlord to a software platform manager. This transaction provides NVIDIA with substantial control over the distribution channel of open-weights AI, which has emerged as a major counterweight to closed proprietary APIs. If NVIDIA successfully maintains the platform's multi-vendor neutral status, it will neutralize antitrust concerns while ensuring that the open-source software stack remains optimized for NVIDIA hardware.