Nvidia Announces Acquisition of Hugging Face for $12.93 Billion
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced an agreement to acquire open-source AI platform Hugging Face for approximately $12.93 billion, with the transaction expected to close in the first half of 2027. Despite the acquisition, Nvidia committed to maintaining Hugging Face as an open ecosystem accessible across multi-cloud environments, frameworks, and competing compute hardware. Known as the "GitHub of AI," Hugging Face hosts over 3 million models and 500,000 datasets for 18 million developers and 200,000 enterprise customers. Acquiring this critical infrastructure significantly expands Nvidia's reach into the software ecosystem while prompting close industry scrutiny regarding platform neutrality. Nvidia plans to leverage its engineering and infrastructure resources to improve Hugging Face's platform security, model evaluation, and deployment capabilities. Crucially, developers will not be required to use Nvidia hardware or cloud services to build, fine-tune, or deploy models on the platform.
## BACKGROUND
Hugging Face is a central platform and repository where the global machine learning community hosts and collaborates on AI models, datasets, and applications. It is particularly essential for open-weight models, where pre-trained neural network parameters are publicly shared so developers can inspect or fine-tune models without building them from scratch.