Artificial Intelligence

Nvidia Acquires Hugging Face for $12.9 Billion

Is this a triumph for open-source AI or a calculated move to protect Nvidia's GPU monopoly?

SEP 3·Updated SEP 4

Nvidia Acquires Hugging Face for $12.9 Billion

Story

Above: Clément Delangue in San Francisco, California, on May 9, 2024. Image credit: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg/Getty Images

The Facts

Clément Delangue, co-founder and CEO of Hugging Face, announced Thursday that Nvidia has agreed to acquire the AI developer platform for approximately $12.9 billion, its largest outright purchase to date, surpassing its $6.9 billion buy of networking firm Mellanox in 2020.
Clément Delangue on X
Fox Business
Financial Times
Under the deal, Nvidia will pay roughly $11.9 billion to Hugging Face shareholders and offer up to $1 billion in equity-based retention awards to employees who join Nvidia. The transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2027.
CNN
Fox Business
Hugging Face hosts more than 3 million open AI systems, 500,000 datasets and 1 million applications, while over 18 million developers and 200,000 enterprise customers use the platform. Nvidia released more than 500 open systems on Hugging Face before the deal.
CNN
Fox Business
NVIDIA on X
Hugging Face turned down a $500 million investment from Nvidia last year, which would have valued it at $7 billion, in order to preserve its independence. Its last disclosed funding round in August 2023 valued the company at $4.5 billion.
Reuters
Financial Times
Bloomberg
Delangue told CNBC he approached Nvidia over the summer about a deal, saying open-source AI "was at the turning point" and needed more resources and scale. Nvidia pledged the platform will remain open for the broader AI ecosystem.
CNBC
The Wall Street Journal
A risk disclosure in Nvidia's SEC filing noted that government restrictions on Chinese-developed AI systems could harm Hugging Face's business, since the platform hosts systems from Chinese firms, including DeepSeek and Moonshot AI.
Reuters
Fox Business
Tech Times

Sources Split

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RIGHT

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ESTAB

The Spin

Narrative A

This is a massive win for open-source AI — the deal brings the compute, infrastructure and scale needed to make open-source the default way to build AI. Hugging Face stays open, independent and compute-agnostic, and the full team stays on to keep pushing the mission. This backing lets 100 million AI builders own their intelligence instead of renting it.

Jensen Huang on X

Thomas Wolf on X

Clément Delangue on X

Narrative B

Nvidia paying $12.9 billion — 86 times revenue — for a free model-sharing platform isn't generosity. OpenAI, Anthropic and Google are all building their own chips to escape Nvidia's grip, and open-source systems running on CUDA GPUs are the one ecosystem that can't defect. Owning Hugging Face locks in the distribution layer for the corner of AI that keeps Nvidia relevant no matter what.