Nvidia Reportedly Agrees to Buy Open Source AI Platform Hugging Face for $12.9 Billion

Nvidia has reportedly agreed to acquire Hugging Face, the platform that has become one of the most important hubs for open source artificial intelligence development, in a deal valued at roughly 12.9 billion dollars.

The agreement, first reported by The Information, would give the world's dominant maker of AI chips direct ownership of a company that hosts a vast library of pretrained models, datasets, and developer tools used across natural language processing, computer vision, and other corners of the AI field. Hugging Face has grown into something akin to a central library and social network for AI researchers and engineers, a role that makes it valuable well beyond its own revenue.

A Bet on Open Source Catching Up

The purchase price marks a dramatic jump from Hugging Face's last known valuation of 4.5 billion dollars, set during a Series D funding round in 2023 that Nvidia itself participated in with an investment of 235 million dollars. Buying the company outright would let Nvidia consolidate its influence over the open source side of the AI industry at a moment when open weight models are racing to close the gap with closed systems built by companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic.

For Nvidia, the deal extends a strategy of pushing beyond selling processors and into owning more of the software and developer infrastructure that determines how AI gets built and deployed. Owning Hugging Face would give the company a direct line into the habits and preferences of the millions of developers who rely on the platform to share and download models, potentially shaping which chips and tools those developers reach for next.

Reshaping the Balance of Power in AI

Critics of the arrangement are likely to raise questions about neutrality, since Hugging Face has built trust in the developer community partly by remaining independent of any single chipmaker or cloud provider. Should the acquisition close, Nvidia would need to convince the open source community that the platform will remain an even playing field rather than becoming a showcase for Nvidia's own hardware and software stack. Neither company has issued a formal comment confirming the terms of the deal.