Nvidia has confirmed its acquisition of Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, ending weeks of speculation about a deal. Hugging Face’s platform hosts three million models, one million applications, and half a million datasets, serving more than 18 million developers.
In a blog post, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said Hugging Face would remain an open platform, allowing developers to choose their preferred models, frameworks, clouds, and computing platforms without requiring Nvidia hardware. Huang pointed to Nvidia’s existing contributions of over 500 models and 250 open datasets on the platform, framing openness as central to broad developer adoption.
Founded in 2016, Hugging Face had raised more than $395 million to date, with its most recent round in 2023 led by Salesforce Ventures. The company reportedly reached $150 million in annualized revenue last month and had previously turned down a $500 million offer from Nvidia.
Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue said the company sought Nvidia’s backing to secure the compute, support, and visibility needed to scale as an alternative to closed-source AI services.
Huang has been a prominent advocate for open-weight models, citing their importance to U.S. competitiveness and cybersecurity, noting that autonomous defense systems increasingly depend on them. Nvidia has invested heavily in the space, including a reported $6 billion deal with coding startup Poolside and more than $50 billion across AI labs. Delangue previously credited an open Nvidia model with helping Hugging Face defend against a cyberattack involving an unreleased OpenAI model.
