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Nvidia to acquire Hugging Face for $12.9 billion in major open-source AI expansion deal
Nvidia plans to acquire Hugging Face for $13 billion, strengthening its role in open AI models, AI infrastructure and the fast-growing AI industry.
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Nvidia has officially agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion. The deal will give the chipmaker control of the popular open-source AI platform as Nvidia expands beyond making chips and moves further into the wider AI industry.
Hugging Face will remain an open platform after the acquisition. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the platform will continue to serve the entire AI ecosystem rather than becoming a platform only for Nvidia products, according to a blog post by Huang on Thursday.
Nvidia-Hugging Face deal
Nvidia wants to expand Hugging Face's platform and infrastructure. Huang said the deal will help strengthen the platform and give developers and institutions around the world greater access to AI, according to his blog post.
The deal had been expected before Nvidia officially announced it. The Information had reported on the possible acquisition last week. Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue said the company itself approached Nvidia. He told CNBC on Thursday that Hugging Face contacted Huang during the summer to discuss a possible deal.
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The talks moved very quickly. Delangue said Hugging Face and open-source AI had reached an important point where the company needed more resources, greater scale and more visibility.
Delangue said Nvidia was a “perfect home” for Hugging Face. He said the two sides moved quickly from their first discussions to reaching an agreement, CNBC reported.
Nvidia AI expansion
The acquisition will be Nvidia's second-biggest deal on record. Its biggest deal was the $20 billion purchase of assets from AI chip company Groq in December 2025.
Before the Groq deal, Nvidia's biggest acquisition was Mellanox. Nvidia bought Israeli chipmaker Mellanox for almost $7 billion, making the Hugging Face deal significantly larger than that earlier acquisition.
Nvidia's rise has been driven by huge demand for its AI chips. The company became the world's most valuable company as its graphics processing units, or GPUs, powered much of the generative AI boom, according to CNBC.
AI software and models
Hugging Face gives Nvidia a major position in AI software and models. The acquisition shows Nvidia is trying to become more than a chip company by moving further into the AI software and platform business.
Hugging Face is also coming off a recent cybersecurity incident. The platform was recently at the centre of a hacking incident that raised concerns about the fast development of powerful AI and cybersecurity tools, according to CNBC.
Hugging Face hack
Delangue blamed engineering mistakes for the attack. He said the breach was linked to problems in the company's engineering process.
Hugging Face used an Nvidia version of a Chinese open AI model to deal with the attack. Delangue said the company used the Nvidia version of the Chinese open model as part of its response to the incident.
Delangue said the attack showed why open AI models are important. He argued that the incident made it even more important for Hugging Face to increase its support for the wider use of open-source AI, CNBC reported.
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Open-source AI
Huang also argued that open AI can help cybersecurity defenders. He said an open-source environment can give defenders an “asymmetric advantage” because there are potentially many more people working to protect systems than there are attackers.
Huang said open models allow the AI community to work together more openly. He explained that developers and security experts can collaborate and share information through open models, which can help defenders respond to threats.
AI chip business
The deal is therefore about more than Nvidia buying an AI platform. It brings together Nvidia's massive computing and chip business with Hugging Face's open-source AI community, giving Nvidia a stronger position across both the hardware and software sides of AI.
For Hugging Face, the Nvidia deal provides access to greater resources and scale. Delangue's comments suggest the company sees Nvidia's size and reach as a way to expand open-source AI to more developers and institutions around the world.
Nvidia's bigger AI strategy
The bigger AI strategy is clear: Nvidia is using its position as the leading AI chipmaker to build a much wider AI business. The Hugging Face acquisition strengthens its presence in AI models, developers, open-source software and AI infrastructure, while keeping the platform open to the wider AI community.
