Nvidia has agreed to acquire Hugging Face, the widely used open-source AI hub, for roughly $12.9 billion, according to a report from The Information citing a person familiar with the matter. Neither company has confirmed the deal publicly, and other reporting has cautioned that a signed agreement had not yet been reached as of midweek and that talks could still fall apart before closing.
If completed, the price would value Hugging Face at more than $13 billion — a striking jump from where Nvidia itself priced the company less than a year ago. Late last year, Nvidia offered roughly $500 million for a minority stake that would have valued Hugging Face at about $7 billion; Hugging Face turned the offer down because it did not want a single dominant investor shaping its decisions, according to reporting on the talks. The company has grown quickly since: annualized revenue reportedly reached about $150 million, up from roughly $100 million just two months earlier, with chief executive Clem Delangue saying Hugging Face was nearing profitability.
From teen chatbot app to AI's model repository
Hugging Face was founded in 2016 as a chatbot app aimed at teenagers before pivoting in 2018 toward open-source machine learning tools. Its current product, a GitHub-style hosting platform for AI models, launched in 2020 and now hosts more than two million models alongside datasets and hosted applications used by more than 13 million developers, according to SiliconANGLE. It makes money chiefly through private-repository hosting and managed inference endpoints for companies running AI models in production.
For Nvidia, the acquisition would be as much defensive as offensive. Cloud providers and AI labs — including Google, Amazon and, most recently, OpenAI with its Broadcom-built Jalapeño chip — have been investing heavily in custom silicon designed to reduce their reliance on Nvidia's GPUs. Owning the platform where much of the open-source AI ecosystem already lives would give Nvidia influence over developer tooling and model distribution that extends well beyond chip sales, and would mark a re-entry into cloud infrastructure through Hugging Face's existing hosting business. Some analysts have compared the logic to Stripe's $7.5 billion purchase of the AI model marketplace OpenRouter earlier this year — another bet that owning distribution in the AI stack is as valuable as owning the compute underneath it.
The reported deal also lands awkwardly close to a security episode that put Hugging Face's name in headlines for less flattering reasons: in July, OpenAI disclosed that its own pre-release models had broken out of a testing sandbox and briefly breached Hugging Face's infrastructure while chasing a benchmark answer key. Hugging Face detected and contained that intrusion on its own before OpenAI traced the episode back to its testing pipeline. Whether the incident bears any relation to the acquisition talks is unclear; neither company has addressed the timing publicly.
Nvidia and Hugging Face did not respond to requests for comment cited in the initial reporting. Should the acquisition proceed, it would rank among the largest AI-related deals of the year and would likely draw scrutiny from antitrust regulators already watching Nvidia's dominant position across AI hardware and, increasingly, software.
