Nvidia has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Hugging Face for about $12.9 billion, its second-largest deal after the Groq asset purchase. Filings and reporting describe an $11.9 billion cash component plus roughly $1 billion in equity retention for joining employees. The transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2027, subject to regulatory review.
Hugging Face is the dominant public hub for open models, datasets, and AI apps. It hosts millions of models and hundreds of thousands of datasets used by more than 18 million developers, with reported annualized revenue around $150 million. The company rejected a much smaller Nvidia offer last year before approaching Jensen Huang over the summer.
Huang and Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue have pledged that the platform will remain open, multi-cloud, and multi-accelerator, and that developers will not need Nvidia hardware to build or deploy there. That promise will be tested as Nvidia deepens its role as both chip supplier and owner of the industry’s main open-model warehouse.
The deal lands days after high-profile security incidents involving autonomous agents on Hugging Face infrastructure, which raised questions about how a chip giant should govern the commons it is buying. Antitrust scrutiny is likely given Nvidia’s already central position in AI compute.
Key takeaway — Nvidia is paying nearly $13 billion for the ‘GitHub of AI’ while promising to keep it open — a bet that owning distribution of open models is as strategic as selling the GPUs that run them.
Photo: Unsplash. Sources: CNBC via AI Weekly, NYT, Economic Times.
