Nvidia completes $12.93 billion acquisition of Hugging Face
Nvidia has confirmed that it is acquiring Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, ending weeks of speculation around a deal for one of the AI industry’s most widely used development platforms. Hugging Face hosts three million models, one million applications, more than 500,000 datasets and serves over 18 million developers.
Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive, said Hugging Face will continue to support open-source and open-weight models. He also said the company will work to broaden developer access while preserving the platform’s role across the wider AI ecosystem.
An open-platform commitment
Huang said developers will retain the ability to select the models, frameworks, cloud providers, inference services and computing platforms they want. Nvidia compute, he said, will not be required either to build on Hugging Face or to deploy through it.
The confirmation follows expectations set by reports pointed to a $12.9 billion transaction as reports pointed to a $12.9 billion transaction, while the completed deal places Hugging Face inside Nvidia’s portfolio at a materially specified price of $12.93 billion.
Nvidia already has a substantial presence on the platform. Huang said the company has released more than 500 models and 250 open datasets through Hugging Face, positioning those releases as a way to reach developers globally.
Scale, funding and commercial context
Founded in 2016, Hugging Face has raised more than $395 million in funding, based on Crunchbase data cited in the report. Its 2023 round raised $235 million and was led by Salesforce Ventures, with Google, Amazon, IBM and Nvidia also investing.
Hugging Face chief executive Clem Delangue said the community had shown that the company could offer an alternative to closed-source APIs. He said further expansion required more compute, support, collaboration and visibility, which led the company to engage with Huang.
The platform’s commercial momentum is also part of the backdrop. The Information reported last month that Hugging Face was generating $150 million in annualized revenue, while Delangue told TechCrunch in July that its growth rate was bringing it close to profitability. The Financial Times reported that the company rejected a $500 million Nvidia deal last year.
What businesses should assess
For enterprises using Hugging Face, the key stated commitment is continued choice rather than mandatory use of Nvidia infrastructure. Procurement teams should nevertheless assess how platform ownership, model governance, cloud arrangements and inference-provider options fit their existing AI architecture as the transaction moves from announcement to operational integration.