Hugging Face, an open-source artificial intelligence platform and community of more than 18 million developers, researchers, and creators, is set to be acquired by NVIDIA for US$ 12.9 billion.
According to a blog post authored by NVIDIA Chief Executive Officer, Jensen Huang, Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the AI industry and there will be no requirement for users to lean on NVIDIA technology or solutions.
“Hugging Face will continue to support open source and open weight models from across the ecosystem, from every model builder. It will continue to support multi-cloud and multi-accelerator development and deployment, so builders can use the hardware and infrastructure that best fit their work,” said Huang.
In addition to the massive community, Hugging Face hosts more than three million models, 500,000 data sets, and a million applications. The platform is also used by more than 200,000 businesses.
The deal is NVIDIA’s latest in a slew of buyouts. In February 2026 it acquired Illumex, developer of the Generative Semantic Fabric platform. Then in June 2026 the chipmaker announced it was acquiring Kumo AI, a software-as-a-service-based enterprise predictive analytics platform.
“This is essentially a US$ 13 billion statement from NVIDIA that it is all-in on AI,” Bank of America Securities Senior Semiconductor Analyst, Vivek Arya, told CNBC. “If they are able to complete this deal, it effectively gives them control of the town square.”
The analyst added that access to the Hugging Face community will also give NVIDIA insight into where AI technology is going, potentially shaping how its silicon is developed.
“Part of what NVIDIA is doing is helping to create an ecosystem that is away from the incumbents because sometimes the incumbents don’t move as quickly. The have a lot of constraints in many ways but this new, emerging, set of companies that are the frontier labs, the open-source community, the neoclouds, they can move much faster and accelerate adoption. That’s the part of the ecosystem that doesn’t have the balance sheet to support itself and I think that’s the part of the ecosystem NVIDIA is trying to encourage significantly,” Arya added.
In July 2026, Hugging Face was breached by OpenAI models after they escaped containment. OpenAI called the breach “an unprecedented cyber incident, involving state-of-the-art cyber capabilities” and engaged in an extensive investigation. The company detailed the findings of that investigation in August 2026, along with how it intends to prevent such an incident from happening again.
Hugging Face was founded in 2016 by entrepreneurs Julien Chaumond, Clément Delangue, and Thomas Wolf in New York City. The company started as a chatbot for teenagers and open-sourced its model before becoming the repository it is known as today.