Nvidia has agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, according to a report from The Information citing a person with knowledge of the agreement. The transaction would give Nvidia control of one of the most important platforms in the open-source artificial intelligence ecosystem.
Hugging Face operates a widely used repository where developers can find, share and download open-source AI models and datasets.
The platform also helps developers optimize models to run across different types of server chips and provides cloud services for deploying AI models within applications.
The reported acquisition would represent one of Nvidia’s largest deals and significantly expand the chipmaker’s position beyond GPUs and other AI computing infrastructure.
The strategic rationale is closely tied to the growing competition between open and closed AI models.
Companies including OpenAI and Anthropic are developing proprietary models while also pursuing their own AI chips in an effort to reduce dependence on Nvidia hardware.
A larger ecosystem of competitive open models could help preserve demand for Nvidia’s chips by providing businesses with alternatives to AI platforms that increasingly control both their models and underlying computing infrastructure.
Nvidia has already been investing heavily in open AI, including developing its Nemotron family of models. The Information reported that the company has committed tens of billions of dollars toward its open-model efforts.
Hugging Face could give Nvidia a major distribution point for those efforts while also providing closer relationships with developers building and deploying open-source models.
The reported $12.9 billion purchase price represents a substantial premium to Hugging Face’s previous valuation.
Hugging Face raised $235 million in 2023 at a $4.5 billion valuation. Nvidia participated in that financing alongside investors including Salesforce and Google.
The company reportedly rejected a $500 million investment proposal from Nvidia in 2025 that would have valued Hugging Face at approximately $7 billion.
That offer would have given Nvidia a substantial position in the company without acquiring it outright.
Hugging Face’s revenue has also been accelerating.
The Information reported that the company recently reached approximately $150 million in annualized revenue, compared with around $100 million only a couple of months earlier.
At $12.9 billion, the reported acquisition price represents roughly 80 times Hugging Face’s annualized revenue, highlighting the strategic value Nvidia appears to place on the platform rather than its current financial scale.
Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue previously said the company doubled its number of paying subscribers during the first half of 2026 and was approaching profitability.
The startup generates revenue through monthly subscriptions as well as charges tied to computing usage and data storage.
The acquisition could also renew Nvidia’s ambitions in AI cloud computing.
Nvidia previously scaled back its DGX Cloud strategy, which involved renting Nvidia-powered computing capacity from major cloud providers and making that infrastructure available to AI customers.
Hugging Face already enables developers to run models using cloud computing resources, potentially giving Nvidia another route into cloud-based AI infrastructure and services.
Hugging Face was founded in 2016 by Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf and has become a central distribution and collaboration platform for open-source AI.
Acquiring the company would also raise questions about Hugging Face’s position as a relatively neutral platform that supports models running on hardware from multiple chip providers, including Nvidia competitors.
There is also some uncertainty around the exact status of the transaction.
While The Information reported that Nvidia has agreed to the $12.9 billion acquisition, separate reporting indicated that the companies had been discussing a deal valued at more than $13 billion. Nvidia and Hugging Face had not publicly announced the acquisition at the time of the reports.
If completed at the reported price, the acquisition would give Nvidia ownership of a key piece of AI’s open-source infrastructure at a time when the company is increasingly investing across models, cloud computing and AI software in addition to its dominant semiconductor business.
