Nvidia may have reached an agreement to acquire Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, potentially giving it leverage over an open-source AI platform that claims 13 million users and 3 million models.
Key points:
The Information affirms that the two groups reached a buyout agreement valuing Hugging Face at $12.9 billion.
Hugging Face has established itself as a major hub for distributing open AI models, datasets, and development tools.
Neither of the two companies has officially confirmed the deal, so the reported terms still need to be verified.
Nvidia’s proposed acquisition
The Information reported on August 27 that Nvidia had agreed to acquire Hugging Face, citing a source close to the matter, after initial rumors of a possible deal worth around $13 billion. Neither Nvidia nor Hugging Face has publicly announced the transaction at this stage.
Founded in 2016 as a chatbot application, Hugging Face quickly pivoted to machine learning and open-source development. The platform says it has reached 13 million users and more than 500,000 public datasets in 2025, while its model repository surpassed the 3 million reference mark in August 2026.
The price of $12.9 billion would represent nearly three times the $4.5 billion valuation from the 2023 Series D funding round, in which Nvidia participated. Such an acquisition would therefore place one of the largest open-model repositories under the control of the same group that supplies much of the computing hardware used to train and run AI systems.
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Ruben Roy’s analysis
Analyst Ruben Roy at Stifel estimates that this alleged acquisition would fit into Nvidia’s broader strategy for open AI and would strengthen its influence beyond chips, through software and development infrastructure. Nvidia reported $96.2 billion in revenue for its second fiscal quarter, giving it significant capacity to fund acquisitions and investments.
Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf declined to comment on a possible sale to Nvidia in an interview with Bloomberg, while noting that the company “has always attracted a lot of interest.”
The issue of platform neutrality could become central, with developers using it today regardless of the hardware, model families, or competing cloud services.
Nvidia has progressively strengthened its ties with Hugging Face. The group participated in the 2023 funding round of $235 million, then later proposed an investment of $500 million, valuing the company at $7 billion—an offer that Hugging Face rejected. The reported $12.9 billion acquisition would represent a change of scale, shifting Nvidia from investor and partner to owner.
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