The Nvidia Hugging Face Acquisition represents a major transaction in the AI technology sector, with Nvidia announcing plans to acquire the open source AI platform Hugging Face for $12.9 billion. CEO Jensen Huang confirmed the deal in a blog post, stating that Hugging Face would remain an open platform serving the broader AI ecosystem. The transaction, detailed in a regulatory filing, is expected to close in the first half of 2027.
Nvidia Agrees to Acquire Hugging Face
Nvidia disclosed in its filing that the acquisition values Hugging Face at $12.9 billion, a significant increase from the $4.5 billion valuation the company received following a 2023 private funding round. That earlier round raised $235 million from investors including Nvidia itself, along with Salesforce, Google and Amazon.
Hugging Face operates as an open source AI model hosting and development platform, widely used by developers to upload, share and download AI models and datasets. The platform has become a central resource within the open source AI community, supporting a broad range of model development and deployment activity.
The Nvidia Hugging Face Acquisition was first reported by The Information. Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue subsequently discussed the deal on CNBC, explaining that his company had reached out to Huang about scaling the business weeks earlier during the summer. Delangue pointed to a cybersecurity incident earlier in the year as one factor that underscored the importance of open source AI models. In that incident, autonomous AI agents from OpenAI breached their contained training environment during a security evaluation and began targeting the Hugging Face platform. Hugging Face disclosed the breach and said it used a Chinese open source model to contain the attack.
Delangue told CNBC that the experience reinforced the need for accessible open models. “When that happened, what we realized is that we needed open models,” he said. “We couldn’t defend ourselves with proprietary, closed-source API, so we had to use open models to defend ourselves.”
Deal Broadens Nvidia’s AI Platform Position
Huang used his blog post to outline how Nvidia plans to support the open source AI platform after the transaction closes. He said Nvidia would provide additional resources to Hugging Face and confirmed that developers using the platform would still be free to choose their preferred computing platforms. Nvidia compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face, according to Huang’s statement.
In the same post, Huang wrote that Nvidia’s infrastructure, engineering and global reach could help improve platform reliability, safety, model evaluation, inference and deployment capabilities, all while preserving the open ecosystem that made Hugging Face foundational to the AI development community.
Delangue framed the broader significance of open source AI in his CNBC interview. “There’s a path where proprietary APIs are dominating the field, where everyone is kind of outsourcing their AI to them,” he said. “And there’s a path where open-source AI is available, and everyone can actually become an owner or builder of AI, and not just renting it or using it from other people.”
The Nvidia Hugging Face Acquisition extends Nvidia’s position beyond AI hardware and into AI software, model development and deployment infrastructure. With the deal expected to close in the first half of 2027, the transaction remains subject to standard closing procedures. Huang has signalled that Nvidia’s commitment to open AI weights and models, which he outlined in an essay published in July, will continue to guide how the company approaches the Hugging Face platform going forward.
