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As was first reported by the Wall Street Journal, NVIDIA confirmed the acquisition of Hugging Face for $12.93 billion on Thursday. According to Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, the acquisition will close in the first half of 2027 pending normal and customary regulatory approvals.
Hugging Face, last assessed at $4.5 billion in its 2023 Series D equity funding round, is now changing hands at nearly three times that valuation. Under the agreement, stockholders will receive approximately $11.9 billion of the sale price, while a $1 billion equity retention structure will incentivize core engineers and researchers to remain at Hugging Face after the transaction closes.
Hugging Face is the leading open-source hub for the discovery, fine-tuning, and deployment of AI models. It hosts more than 3 million models and 500,000 datasets, used by 18 million developers, researchers, and companies worldwide. More than 200,000 firms -- from startups to multinational corporations -- use the platform to build and ship AI products.
For NVIDIA, this is about locking in the distribution layer. The company already sells the GPUs that power most AI training and inference workloads. Hugging Face is where the models that run on those chips originate, get versioned, and get downloaded. Owning that junction gives NVIDIA a structural advantage as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google race to build their own accelerators designed specifically to cut NVIDIA out.
Open-weight models -- the ones that can be downloaded and run locally -- still depend heavily on third-party hardware. Whoever controls the marketplace those models flow through influences which chips get used downstream. That is what NVIDIA just bought.
White House AI advisor David Sacks called the deal a net positive. "It's great to see Nvidia supporting open-source AI in a big way," Sacks wrote. "Keeping innovation decentralized and accessible is the key to avoiding an unsafe and dystopian future where advanced AI capabilities are centralized and controlled by only a few hands."
The irony is not subtle. Hugging Face co-founder Clement Delangue spent years arguing that concentration of power is the single greatest risk in AI. As recently as late 2024, he rejected a $500 million NVIDIA investment offer, saying the company did not want a single dominant investor with the ability to sway decisions about which models are permitted on the platform. This time, Delangue framed NVIDIA as a partner that would keep the platform "open, independent, and compute-agnostic," with a stated goal of making open source "the default way to build AI."
That framing will get stress-tested fast. NVIDIA has a direct financial interest in ensuring open-weight models remain the preferred alternative to closed AI systems built by competitors running their own silicon. How open a platform stays when its owner's GPU revenue depends on the outcome is a question regulators -- and independent AI builders -- will be watching very closely.
NVIDIA was already an investor in Hugging Face, alongside Google, Amazon, Salesforce, AMD, Intel, IBM, and Qualcomm. Getting from investor to outright owner for $12.93 billion represents the largest consolidation move in open-source AI to date -- and a clear signal that the race to control AI infrastructure has entered a new phase.
