Nvidia to buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion

Nvidia has agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, adding one of the best-known open-source AI platforms to its business as it broadens its reach beyond semiconductors. The transaction extends Nvidia’s push up the artificial intelligence stack and gives it a larger role in the tools developers and institutions use to build AI systems.

Deal broadens Nvidia’s AI ambitions

Jensen Huang said the company intends to use the acquisition to expand access to AI for developers and institutions around the world. In a blog post, he said Hugging Face will stay an open platform for the wider AI ecosystem, while Nvidia works to scale the service and improve its infrastructure. The deal follows growing demand for Nvidia’s chips, which have powered much of the generative AI boom.

Hugging Face chief executive Clément Delangue said the company approached Huang over the summer because it saw open-source AI reaching a turning point. He said the business needed greater resources, more scale and more visibility, and described Nvidia as a natural fit. Delangue added that the talks moved quickly once both sides began discussing a transaction.

One of Nvidia’s largest acquisitions

At $12.9 billion, the deal ranks as Nvidia’s second-largest acquisition on record. It trails the company’s $20 billion purchase of assets from chipmaker Groq in December and is larger than its roughly $7 billion purchase of Mellanox in 2019. The size of the transaction underscores how aggressively Nvidia is investing outside its core hardware business.

The acquisition also highlights how important software and developer platforms have become in the AI market. Hugging Face is widely used by engineers and researchers working with open-source models, making it a strategic asset for a company that already sits at the center of AI infrastructure. For Nvidia, the purchase deepens its presence in the layer of the market where applications are built and distributed.

The deal comes after reports last week that a transaction was imminent. Nvidia said Hugging Face will remain open to the broader ecosystem, suggesting the company wants to keep the platform’s existing appeal intact while bringing it into its own orbit. That balance could matter for users who rely on open access and collaboration across the AI community.

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