Nvidia to Buy AI Company Hugging Face for $13 Billion

Nvidia, one of the biggest tech and AI infrastructure company in the world, is eyeing to buy popular developer platform, Hugging Face for $12.93 billion. Nvidia is betting that support for open AI models will drive future demand, as most of its top customers like Meta, Google and Amazon are walking towards developing their own chips to reduce reliance on semiconductor giants. The announcement was made on Sunday and marks the biggest ever acquisition by Nvidia after its $20 billion acquisition of Groq in december. 

As per the agreement, Nvidia will pay $11.9 billion to Hugging Face shareholders while another $1 billion will be paid in equity-based retention incentives for employees who join the company. The transaction is expected to clode by the first half of 2027. 

Hugging Face, often described as a GitHub for open AI models, is home to an expansive open-source library of AI tools. More than 18 million developers, researchers, and creators use Hugging Face to share more than 3 million models, and more than 200,000 companies use the platform to discover and deploy AI.

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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang reassured developers and users, stating that Hugging Face will remain an open source platform for the entire AI ecosystem and Nvidia’s chips won’t be required to either develop, build on or deploy models through it. 

Hugging Face was recently in the spotlight after it was hacked by OpenAI models that went rogue during a testing incident, reviving debate over open versus closed AI systems. This also points towards a general trend in the industry right now where, rather than developing their own models, AI giants are acquiring small, popular AI models to include them in their repertoire.