Nvidia buys Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, a move that pushes the chip giant further into software and developer platforms as it climbs higher up the AI stack.
Announcing the agreement Thursday, Nvidia said Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the broader AI community, according to CEO Jensen Huang. He wrote that the companies plan to scale the service, bolster its infrastructure and widen access to AI tools for developers and institutions worldwide.
Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue said his team approached Huang over the summer because Nvidia was a “perfect home” for the open-source hub, adding that talks moved quickly to reach a deal. Delangue said the company recognized that open-source AI had reached a turning point and needed more resources, scale and visibility.
Nvidia buys Hugging Face as it broadens beyond chips
The transaction is Nvidia’s second-largest to date, after its roughly $20 billion purchase of assets from Groq in December. Before that, its biggest acquisition was Israeli chipmaker Mellanox for nearly $7 billion in 2019.
Nvidia has surged to become the world’s most valuable company on intense demand for its GPUs that power generative AI. Buying Hugging Face underscores a strategic bet on a widely used platform for AI models and tools, signaling Nvidia’s ambition to be more than a hardware provider.
Hugging Face was recently involved in a hacking incident that heightened concerns about the fast-evolving intersection of powerful AI systems and cybersecurity. Delangue attributed the breach to engineering errors and said the company used an Nvidia version of a Chinese open model to address it, a reminder of how AI security demand is reshaping the industry.
He added that the episode reinforced the importance of open models and the need to double down on open-source AI.
Huang said an open environment can give defenders an asymmetric advantage, noting that there are more people protecting systems than attacking them, and that transparent collaboration with open models can strengthen defenses. He has previously highlighted the role of open ecosystems in AI development at events such as the Nvidia GTC conference.
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