27 August 2026

Nvidia agrees to buy Hugging Face, open AI model hub, for $12.9 billion

First reported

Ars Technica, CNBC and 2 others ran this on 27 August, all on the same day.

Hugging Face is a platform where developers share and download open-source AI models, similar to GitHub for code. The company generated $150 million in revenue last year and approached profitability before this deal.
Nvidia is paying roughly 80 times Hugging Face's annual revenue, a steep price that reflects the platform's strategic importance as closed AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic build their own chips to reduce reliance on Nvidia.
The acquisition gives Nvidia control over the largest ecosystem of open-source AI models, potentially steering developers toward Nvidia hardware even as major competitors attempt to become independent from it.
Nvidia previously abandoned its own cloud computing business but could revive it through Hugging Face, which already rents computing power to developers running AI models on its platform.
The deal is not yet finalized. Hugging Face had rejected a $500 million Nvidia investment offer last year, citing concerns about surrendering control to a dominant backer.