Nvidia has finalized the acquisition of the open-source provider Hugging Face for $12.93 billion. The chip company is paying around $11.9 billion to the current owners and up to one billion dollars as a retention bonus for employees who transition to Nvidia. This is the second-largest acquisition in Nvidia’s history.
Nvidia pays nearly twelve billion dollars to the owners
Completion of the acquisition is according to Forbes scheduled for the first half of 2027. It is still subject to the approval of competition authorities. For Nvidia, this is the second-largest acquisition in the company’s history, after the roughly $20 billion acquisition of Groq’s assets at the end of last year. Hugging Face says it has more than 18 million developers and over 200,000 companies as users. The platform hosts more than three million models, 500,000 datasets, and one million applications. As beckmann.ai reported at the end of August, Nvidia initially valued the purchase at $12.9 billion. That was almost three times Hugging Face’s last official valuation of $4.5 billion from 2023. In between, Bloomberg even reported a figure near $14 billion, before both companies settled on the lower final amount. For Hugging Face, this is the largest single deal in its history, after the company had previously raised a total of around $395 million in venture capital.
Huang promises open access without an Nvidia requirement
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang stated in the company’s official blog post that Hugging Face will remain “an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem.” Users will not need Nvidia computing power to build or deploy models and will retain freedom of choice between models, frameworks, cloud providers, and chip platforms. Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue explained the move to CNBC as a matter of necessary growth: the platform needs more computing power, more support, more collaboration, and more visibility. That is why they sought out Huang. According to Delangue, Hugging Face was already approaching profitability before the acquisition. According to industry outlet The Information, the platform recently posted annualized revenue of $150 million. Nvidia itself says it is one of the largest contributors on Hugging Face and has already published more than 500 open models and 250 datasets there. Delangue also gave CNBC a concrete target: the platform’s user count should grow from 18 million today to 100 million within two years.
Developer community fears favoritism toward Nvidia chips
In developer forums, the deal is being compared to Microsoft’s 2018 acquisition of GitHub. That deal steered many software developers toward the Azure cloud platform. Critics fear a similar pattern at Hugging Face: Nvidia could tilt search results, default settings, or model optimizations toward its own graphics chips and disadvantage competing systems such as AMD’s ROCm or Intel GPUs. According to an analysis by Yahoo Finance, some developers are already discussing an independent alternative platform for models and training data. Charlie Dai, an analyst at market research firm Forrester, sees Nvidia gaining a stronger position with developers, model distribution, and the community as a result. He still advises enterprise customers to watch for deeper integration with Nvidia’s own tools and optimization frameworks. Hugging Face had previously turned down a $500 million investment offer from Nvidia in 2025, because co-founder Delangue was wary of the influence of a single investor. According to the Nvidia blog post, the existing founding team of Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf will bring its expertise to a larger stage at Nvidia.
What remains open is how the antitrust review expected around 2027 will turn out. Nvidia’s attempt to acquire chip designer Arm for $40 billion failed in 2022 after objections from several competition authorities concerned about the neutral standing of a central piece of industry infrastructure. Whether Huang’s openness commitments satisfy regulators and the developer community will only become clear once Nvidia actually makes decisions on default settings and visibility on the platform after the deal closes.
