NVIDIA confirms $12.9 billion acquisition of Hugging Face

NVIDIA said Thursday that it has agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, publicly confirming a deal first reported in late August and setting up one of the most significant combinations yet between AI computing infrastructure and developer software.

In a company blog post published Thursday and authored by CEO Jensen Huang, NVIDIA said it had “agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12,930,300,000.” The Information had reported in late August 2026 that NVIDIA had agreed to buy Hugging Face for about $12.9 billion, a report that was later picked up by other major outlets. Thursday’s post is NVIDIA’s official confirmation.

The acquisition matters because Hugging Face has become a central hub for the AI ecosystem, hosting and distributing models, datasets and applications used by developers, researchers and businesses. In its announcement, NVIDIA said Hugging Face serves more than 18 million developers, researchers and creators, with more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets and 1 million applications on the platform. NVIDIA also said more than 200,000 companies use Hugging Face.

For users of the platform, NVIDIA emphasized a point likely to matter as much as the price: Hugging Face will stay open. “Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem,” NVIDIA said in the post, adding that NVIDIA compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face. NVIDIA said the combination is intended to help scale Hugging Face’s platform, strengthen its infrastructure and expand access to AI for developers and institutions worldwide.

Hugging Face was founded in 2016 by Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf. It grew into one of the best-known platforms for AI development, giving users a place to find, share and deploy machine learning models — software trained to recognize patterns and generate outputs — along with datasets and related tools. Its prominence has made it a widely used destination not only for startups and researchers, but also for large companies building AI products.

The deal also underscores how sharply Hugging Face’s value has risen in just a few years. The company raised $235 million in August 2023 at an approximate $4.5 billion valuation, according to prior reporting. That funding round reportedly included NVIDIA among the investors, and the companies had already worked together through technical partnerships before the acquisition announcement.

That history helps explain why the deal did not emerge from nowhere. NVIDIA has become the dominant supplier of AI chips and data center systems used to train and run advanced AI models, while Hugging Face has become a major software and distribution layer for the people and organizations building with those models. Bringing the two together would unite a company best known for the hardware behind the AI boom with one of the most widely used platforms for accessing and deploying AI tools.

NVIDIA framed the transaction as a way to broaden, rather than narrow, access to Hugging Face. Whether that promise reassures developers and enterprise customers may become one of the most closely watched aspects of the deal. For now, the company’s message was direct: the platform is staying open, and users will not need NVIDIA hardware to keep building on it.