After persistent rumors in recent weeks, the matter seems to be taking shape.
According to The Information, Nvidia has agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.9 billion. On the other hand, Business Insider nuances this by noting ongoing discussions for a valuation above $13 billion.
Neither Nvidia nor Hugging Face has responded to requests from the press.
Founded in 2016 by the French trio Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf, Hugging Face has established itself as the central hub of open-source AI.
Millions of models and datasets are hosted there, shared and refined by developers around the world. A strategic position that helps explain Nvidia’s appetite. Yet, according to The Information, Hugging Face’s annualized revenue remains relatively modest, around $150 million.
This isn’t the first time the two companies have crossed paths. Nvidia had already participated, alongside Salesforce and Google, in a $235 million funding round in 2023, valuing Hugging Face at $4.5 billion.
More recently, the GPU maker had proposed an investment of $500 million valuing the company at $7 billion. Hugging Face rejected the offer, according to the Financial Times, to avoid ending up under the influence of a dominant investor likely to sway its strategic decisions.
If it goes through, the deal would mark one of Nvidia’s largest acquisitions in its history. But the stakes go beyond mere financial calculations.
A precedent: Microsoft’s acquisition of GitHub
Hugging Face owes part of its success to its neutrality. The platform hosts models and supports hardware from all players in the sector, including Nvidia’s direct rivals such as AMD and Intel.
This proximity, if it materializes, harks back in many respects to Microsoft’s 2018 acquisition of GitHub. Yet the comparison stops where the strategic dimension of AI begins.
Microsoft sought with GitHub to bring itself closer to developers and to strengthen its software and cloud ecosystem, whereas Nvidia could, with Hugging Face, climb from silicon to the layer of models and their applications.
The potential objective would be less about selling more GPUs and more about shaping the platform where models are chosen, tested, and deployed to run them.
A strategy that also raises a delicate neutrality question: Hugging Face today supports an ecosystem of models and infrastructures that extends far beyond Nvidia. The acquisition would potentially turn the dominant GPU supplier into the owner of one of the main gateways to open-source AI.
