Nvidia Agrees to Acquire Hugging Face for $12.93B in Historic Push Beyond Silicon into Open-Source AI Software
SANTA CLARA — Semiconductor and computing giant Nvidia has reached a definitive agreement to acquire Hugging Face, the world's preeminent open-source artificial intelligence model repository and developer collaboration hub, for approximately $12.93 billion.
The multi-billion-dollar transaction marks one of Nvidia's largest acquisitions to date, signaling an aggressive expansion beyond hardware accelerators and into the software, distribution, and community layers of the global AI stack.
Founded over a decade ago, Hugging Face has evolved into the digital town square for artificial intelligence researchers, engineers, and enterprise builders. The platform hosts a massive global community:
User Base: Serving over 18 million developers, data scientists, and creators.
Repository Scale: Hosting more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets, and 1 million interactive applications.
Commercial Penetration: Utilized by more than 200,000 enterprise organizations globally to discover, fine-tune, and deploy models.
Despite coming under Nvidia’s corporate umbrella, both companies emphasized that Hugging Face will retain its independent brand identity and maintain strict hardware and ecosystem neutrality. Developers and enterprise clients will not be mandated to run on Nvidia GPUs or its proprietary software stacks. Hugging Face will continue to natively support competing cloud service providers, multi-cloud architectures, third-party silicon accelerators, and open-weight models from across the global builder ecosystem.
"AI advances faster when people can build together," said Jensen Huang, Founder and CEO of Nvidia. "Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem. Developers will choose the models they want, the frameworks they want, the clouds and inference service providers they want, and the computing platforms they want. Nvidia compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face."
Nvidia, already among the platform’s largest contributors with over 500 models and 250 open datasets, stated that its global scale, data center infrastructure, and research capabilities will be deployed to strengthen Hugging Face’s repository reliability, model evaluation frameworks, and safety tooling.
