Nvidia Buys Hugging Face in a $13 Billion Deal

Nvidia has agreed to buy Hugging Face, the platform where much of the open-source AI world stores and shares its models, in a deal worth about $13 billion. The two companies signed a definitive agreement on 2 September, and Nvidia confirmed the terms in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The structure puts roughly $11.9 billion in the hands of Hugging Face shareholders, with a further $1 billion set aside as an equity retention pot for staff who move across to Nvidia. The deal is expected to close in the first half of 2027, once regulators in the relevant markets have signed off.

For Nvidia, this is a move up the stack. The company already sells most of the chips that train and run large models, and it is the single biggest contributor of open models and datasets to Hugging Face. Owning the hub itself gives it a direct line to the more than 18 million developers who use the platform to publish and download over 3 million models.

Keeping the platform open

The obvious worry, for anyone who relies on Hugging Face as neutral ground, is what happens to a community hub when a chipmaker owns it. Nvidia has tried to answer that up front. It says Hugging Face will stay open to the whole ecosystem, that developers will still be able to upload and download whatever models and datasets they choose, and that support for rival silicon will continue.

Jensen Huang, Nvidia's chief executive, framed the logic on X: "Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty." Justin Boitano, who runs Nvidia's enterprise computing group, added that a healthy mix of open and closed models is what keeps the developer base growing.

Whether that promise holds under a new owner is the question the market will watch. Nvidia has every commercial reason to keep the platform welcoming, since more developers building more models means more demand for its hardware. The tension comes if support for competing chips ever starts to look like a cost rather than a courtesy.

A hedge against the chip cycle

The purchase also reads as insurance. Nvidia's revenue still leans heavily on selling accelerators into a booming market, and booms do not last forever. Owning the layer where AI work is organised and shared gives it a foothold that does not depend on the next quarter's chip orders.

Hugging Face had been in talks over a sale for weeks. We covered the early reports in late August, when the figure being floated was already close to $13 billion. The confirmed number lands almost exactly there.