New Delhi, September 4(APAC Media): Nvidia will acquire AI developer platform Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, expanding the chipmaker’s role in the software and open-source AI ecosystem.
The deal, announced by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on September 3, is the company’s largest acquisition to date. Under the agreement, about $11.9 billion will go to Hugging Face shareholders, while Nvidia will provide up to $1 billion in equity-based retention incentives for employees. The transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2027, subject to regulatory approvals.
Nvidia-Hugging Face Acquisition
Hugging Face has become a major platform for developing, sharing and deploying AI models and datasets. The company says its platform is used by more than 18 million developers, researchers and creators and hosts over 3 million models, 500,000 datasets and 1 million applications. More than 200,000 companies use the platform.
Open-Source AI And Nvidia
The acquisition also raises questions about whether Nvidia could use Hugging Face to push its own hardware and software. Nvidia has said the platform will remain open and that developers will continue to choose their preferred models, frameworks, cloud providers, inference services and computing platforms. Nvidia hardware will not be mandatory for building or deploying models through Hugging Face.
Why The Deal Matters
For Nvidia, the acquisition moves its AI strategy further beyond chips and into the developer ecosystem. The company is already investing heavily in open models as major technology companies develop their own AI accelerators and seek to reduce dependence on Nvidia hardware.
Hugging Face gives Nvidia access to a large community working on open-source and open-weight AI. The company’s platform could also give Nvidia a stronger position as developers increasingly look for alternatives to closed AI systems.
Nvidia said it plans to invest engineering and infrastructure resources in Hugging Face, including areas such as model evaluation, inference, deployment, reliability and safety.
