Nvidia confirmed, on September 3, the acquisition of Hugging Face, the go-to platform for open-source AI developers, for $12.93 billion.
The deal was announced in a post on Nvidia’s official blog, written and signed by Jensen Huang, cofounder and chief executive of Nvidia.
“I am thrilled to announce that NVIDIA has agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12,930,300,000. Together, we will grow the Hugging Face platform, strengthen its infrastructure, and broaden access to AI for developers and institutions around the world,” the CEO wrote.
In his post, Jensen Huang commits to preserving the openness of the platform:
- Hugging Face “will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem”;
- developers will continue to be free to choose the models, frameworks, clouds, and inference providers they prefer;
- Nvidia hardware will not be required to build or deploy projects via Hugging Face;
- the platform will continue to support open-source and open-weight models from all model creators, not just those from Nvidia.
Jensen Huang also notes that he recently co-signed an open letter on the importance of open weights for the AI economy, alongside other industry leaders, arguing that open models allow leadership in AI to be shared among more players.
He highlights Nvidia’s historical contribution to the open-source ecosystem, marking it as the most significant contributor of open models and data on Hugging Face, with more than 500 models and over 250 datasets published on the platform.
The CEO also discusses his relationship with Hugging Face’s cofounder, Clément Delangue (“Clem”), saying he was honored to have been approached to consider “the next chapter” for Hugging Face, with the idea that Nvidia would be a good home for the company, its community, and the future of open models.
He notes that the Hugging Face team will retain its iconic brand.
The commitments Jensen Huang has announced
According to information reported by Reuters, the deal is structured as follows:
- about $11.9 billion will be paid to Hugging Face’s investors;
- a stock retention program potentially reaching $1 billion will be offered to employees who join Nvidia.
For comparison, Hugging Face was valued at $4.5 billion during its last publicly disclosed funding round in August 2023, when the company raised $235 million from investors such as Salesforce, AMD, and Amazon.
This acquisition comes at a time when demand for open-weight models is rising strongly, driven by companies looking to reduce the cost of deploying AI.
For Nvidia, the purchase also strengthens its position as some of its largest customers (Meta, OpenAI, and Microsoft) develop their own AI chips to reduce reliance on Nvidia’s processors, which are costly and subject to supply constraints.
