NVIDIA to Acquire Open-Source AI Platform Hugging Face for $12.93 Billion
NVIDIA has agreed to acquire open-source AI platform Hugging Face for $12.93 billion. CEO Jensen Huang pledged to maintain the platform's open ecosystem across multi-cloud and non-NVIDIA hardware environments while expanding its engineering capabilities. Hugging Face is the central collaboration hub for the global open-source AI community, hosting over 3 million models used by more than 200,000 enterprises. Placing this critical infrastructure under NVIDIA's control could significantly reshape the open-source AI landscape, though NVIDIA insists it will not lock developers into its hardware. NVIDIA is already the largest contributor to Hugging Face, having published over 500 models and 250 open datasets on the platform. Following the acquisition, NVIDIA plans to use its global infrastructure and engineering capacity to enhance Hugging Face's platform reliability, security, evaluation, inference, and deployment tooling.
## BACKGROUND
Hugging Face serves as the primary ecosystem for machine learning collaboration, functioning similarly to GitHub for AI models, datasets, and applications. Open-weights models allow organizations and researchers to adopt advanced AI capabilities without the prohibitive cost of training foundation models from scratch. NVIDIA dominates the global market for AI hardware accelerators used to train and run these models.