Nvidia to Acquire Hugging Face for $12.93 Billion

Nvidia announced on September 3, 2026, that it has agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12,930,300,000 in a deal aimed at scaling the open-source artificial intelligence platform. Under the terms outlined by Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang, Hugging Face will maintain its brand and operate as an open platform supporting multi-cloud environments, alternative hardware accelerators, and models from across the AI industry.

The acquisition brings one of the central hubs for open-source and open-weight AI development under Nvidia’s corporate umbrella. According to Huang’s announcement, the platform will continue to serve developers, researchers, and enterprises without requiring the use of Nvidia hardware.

Platform Openness and Hardware Support

Nvidia stated that Hugging Face will preserve its existing platform-neutral structure rather than becoming exclusive to Nvidia infrastructure. Developers using the service will retain the ability to select their preferred tools and environments.

Under the operating commitments detailed in the announcement:

• Hardware choice: Nvidia compute will not be required to build, test, or deploy models through Hugging Face.
• Architecture support: The platform will continue supporting multi-accelerator and multi-cloud configurations across third-party providers.
• Framework flexibility: Developers may continue to host and run models built on any framework or open-weight architecture.
• Branding and team: The Hugging Face team, founded by Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf, will continue operating under the Hugging Face brand.

Addressing the platform’s operational independence, Huang wrote:

“Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem. 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.”

Hugging Face Platform Scale

Founded a decade ago, Hugging Face operates as a central repository and development hub for machine learning assets. Nvidia reported current platform utilization metrics across developer and enterprise tiers:

• More than 18 million registered developers, researchers, and creators
• Over 3 million hosted AI models
• More than 500,000 public datasets
• Over 1 million hosted applications
• More than 200,000 enterprise organizations using the platform for discovery, evaluation, customization, and deployment

Nvidia’s Open-Source Contributions and Technical Integration

Prior to the acquisition agreement, Nvidia was already the largest external contributor of open models and data hosted on Hugging Face. The company has published more than 500 open-weight models and over 250 datasets on the platform for public use and modification.

Following the close of the transaction, Nvidia plans to direct engineering resources toward Hugging Face’s core backend systems. Planned technical focus areas include improving platform uptime, model evaluation frameworks, AI safety tooling, and hosted inference infrastructure.