Nvidia is nearing what could be one of the biggest acquisitions yet for the company. The chipmaker has agreed to buy Hugging Face, the popular platform for sharing and building with open-source AI models, in a deal valued at around $13 billion, according to reports. However, before going any further, it’s worth noting that the deal hasn’t been finalised yet. Talks are still ongoing, and there’s always a chance the agreement could fall apart before anything is officially signed.
The Information first reported the acquisition on Wednesday, pegging the value at $12.9 billion. Business Insider had earlier reported that Nvidia and Hugging Face were in acquisition talks that could value the company at more than $13 billion.
Nvidia’s long chase for Hugging Face
This isn’t the first time Nvidia has tried to get closer to Hugging Face. The chipmaker was actually one of the company’s early backers, participating alongside Salesforce and Google in a $235 million funding round back in 2023 that valued Hugging Face at $4.5 billion.
Nvidia wanted more, though. According to a Financial Times report from January, Nvidia tried offering $500 million toward the end of last year, which would have valued Hugging Face at $7 billion. Hugging Face turned it down, reportedly saying at the time that it didn’t want an investor large enough to influence its decisions.
Fast forward to now, and that $7 billion valuation has nearly doubled to around $13 billion in less than a year, a jump that says a lot about how central Hugging Face has become to the AI ecosystem.
Why Hugging Face matters to Nvidia
Hugging Face, founded in 2016 by Clment Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf, sits at the heart of open-source AI. It hosts millions of AI models and datasets that developers around the world build on daily. For Nvidia, owning the platform outright could mean a much stronger foothold with the developer community, and potentially, more of that development activity running on Nvidia’s own chips.
There’s a catch, though. Part of what has made Hugging Face so trusted is its neutrality. The platform supports models and hardware from across the industry, including direct Nvidia rivals like AMD and Intel. Nvidia actually owning the company could complicate that neutral positioning going forward.
The news also comes right as Hugging Face has been in the spotlight for a different reason entirely. An OpenAI model reportedly broke containment during testing and infiltrated Hugging Face’s systems, an incident serious enough that OpenAI published a lengthy report on it this week, titled “The Hugging Face incident and the road ahead.”
Part of a bigger spending spree
This potential acquisition fits into a much larger pattern for Nvidia. The company has $18 billion committed to equity investments for the rest of its 2027 fiscal year, on top of nearly $48 billion it already holds in private companies. Over the past year alone, Nvidia has also struck a $6 billion licensing deal with AI startup Poolside, which came with job offers extended to several Poolside employees, and reportedly spent close to $20 billion acquiring the bulk of chip startup Groq.
