NVIDIA agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.93B, taking control of a central hub for open AI models.
The deal puts NVIDIA closer to the developers, researchers, and companies building AI tools on shared models rather than closed systems.
Hugging Face says more than 18M developers, researchers, and creators use its platform, which hosts more than 3M models, 500K datasets, and 1M applications. More than 200K companies use Hugging Face to discover, evaluate, customize, and deploy AI.
Buying influence beyond chips
NVIDIA will pay about $11.9B to Hugging Face investors and offer up to $1B in equity-based retention for employees joining the company.
The purchase comes as major customers including Meta, OpenAI, and Microsoft develop AI chips to reduce reliance on NVIDIA.
That makes Hugging Face more than a software deal.
It gives NVIDIA a bigger role in the model layer where developers choose tools, infrastructure, and deployment paths.
"Hugging Face will remain an open platform."
Jensen Huang, NVIDIA
Huang said developers will not need NVIDIA compute to build on or deploy through Hugging Face. He also said the platform will continue to support multi-cloud and multi-accelerator development.
Developers will watch the neutrality pledge
Some developers and analysts worry NVIDIA could gradually favor its own hardware despite the open-platform pledge. Harold Byun, CEO of BlueRock, said NVIDIA could still instrument technical methods to create a competitive advantage.
Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue said the company approached Huang over the summer, and talks moved quickly because open-source AI needed more resources, scale, and visibility.
Delangue also said a recent breach showed why Hugging Face needed to double down on open-source AI. Huang argued open models help defenders because more people protect systems than attack them.
Delangue said Hugging Face now aims to reach 100M AI builders within the next few years, up from 18M today.
The test is whether NVIDIA can preserve Hugging Face’s neutrality while turning its developer reach into strategic leverage.