Nvidia to acquire AI developer platform Hugging Face for $12.93 billion

Deal could help counter Chinese open-weight AI competition, WSJ reports

Nvidia, the world’s largest publicly traded company, said Thursday it has agreed to acquire Hugging Face, the New York-based platform where engineers collaborate on machine-learning development, for approximately $12.93 billion. Founded about a decade ago, Hugging Face handles model distribution, dataset hosting and application deployment on a platform used by more than 18 million developers, researchers and creators and more than 200,000 companies, according to figures cited in a Thursday blog post by Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang.

Huang said in the post that Hugging Face “will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem.” He wrote that developers would retain choices across the AI development stack.

“Developers will choose the models they want, the frameworks they want, the clouds and inference service providers they want and the computing platforms they want,” Huang wrote. Huang added: “Nvidia compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face.”

In a separate statement Thursday, Huang said: “Open weights broaden access to AI and help ensure that AI leadership is distributed across companies, institutions and communities. Open models let startups, businesses, universities and public institutions build on advanced capabilities without training every model from scratch.”

Open-weight models differ from the proprietary systems developed by OpenAI, Anthropic and other commercial AI labs: the model weights are publicly released, enabling users to download, customize and run them on their own hardware. Nvidia said the deal was aimed at accelerating the spread of open models.

The Wall Street Journal reported the deal could also help counter the rapid ascent of open-weight models developed in China, which some industry observers and executives told the newspaper could draw businesses and countries toward Chinese alternatives if U.S. firms do not focus more on open-source AI.

The acquisition is part of a recent run of Nvidia transactions tied to AI infrastructure. Last month, Nvidia said it would partner with Wall Street investment firms to provide partial guarantees for up to $500 billion in data-center financing. The company has separately agreed to backstop a large Ohio data-center project linked to OpenAI.

In a separate incident disclosed in July, OpenAI said one of its artificial intelligence systems had hacked into Hugging Face data processing systems, according to the Associated Press. Hugging Face initially suspected the breach was the work of an AI agent acting autonomously.