Nvidia’s reported $12.9 billion acquisition of Hugging Face would extend the chipmaker’s reach into one of the world’s most widely used platforms for sharing and deploying AI models. (Shutterstock)Nvidia has reportedly agreed to acquire Hugging Face, the platform used by developers to share and deploy artificial intelligence models, for $12.9 billion, according to The Information, as reported by Reuters.
If completed at the reported price, the transaction would become Nvidia’s largest completed acquisition. Its previous record was the roughly $7 billion purchase of networking company Mellanox Technologies, which Nvidia completed in April 2020.
Hugging Face occupies a different part of the AI economy from Nvidia’s core semiconductor business. Its platform functions as a shared workspace where developers, researchers and companies can publish models, download datasets, test applications and collaborate on machine-learning projects. Although it is often described as a repository for open-source AI, the platform hosts models released under a variety of licenses, including models whose weights are available but whose terms do not meet conventional definitions of open-source software.
A developer choosing an AI model can visit Hugging Face before deciding where or how to run it. Ownership would consequently place Nvidia closer to decisions made near the beginning of an AI project, rather than limiting the company’s role to selling the processors used later for training and inference. Hugging Face also provides paid services, including enterprise support and hosted inference, giving the business commercial operations beyond its public model repository.
The proposed acquisition could connect that developer reach with Nvidia’s existing hardware, CUDA software and cloud-based AI services. Nvidia already works with Hugging Face: the companies have collaborated on inference services, robotics tools and access to Nvidia computing infrastructure. In March, Nvidia said a robotics partnership would connect its developer community with Hugging Face’s AI builders through the open-source LeRobot framework.
The $12.9 billion reported price represents a sharp increase from Hugging Face’s previous financing valuation. Nvidia joined Google, Amazon, Salesforce and other investors in a $235 million funding round in 2023 that valued the startup at $4.5 billion. The reported takeover value is nearly three times that valuation.
Revenue offers another way to assess the premium. Hugging Face’s annualized revenue was estimated at approximately $150 million.. Based on that estimate, the reported purchase price represents roughly 86 times annualized revenue. The size of the multiple suggests Nvidia may be placing greater value on Hugging Face’s developer community, software ecosystem and role in AI model distribution than on its current sales alone.
Nvidia has the financial capacity to pursue acquisitions as its AI infrastructure business expands. The company reported second-quarter fiscal 2027 revenue of $96.2 billion, up 106% from a year earlier. Data-center revenue reached $89 billion, while cash and cash equivalents stood at approximately $22.4 billion at the end of the quarter.
Hugging Face has built its standing partly by serving developers across competing hardware and cloud environments. Its investors and technology partners have included Nvidia rivals and major cloud providers. Nvidia ownership could prompt questions about whether the platform would continue giving equal technical and commercial treatment to models optimized for competing accelerators.
Those concerns do not establish that Nvidia would restrict the platform or favor its own products. Neither company has disclosed how Hugging Face would be governed, whether it would remain operationally independent or how existing partnerships would be handled. Until terms are published, conclusions about future access, pricing or platform neutrality remain speculative.
Regulators would also have to consider whether control of a widely used model hub could strengthen Nvidia’s influence beyond AI processors. The FTC previously challenged Nvidia’s proposed Arm purchase, arguing that ownership of technology used by competing chipmakers could harm competition. The agency has separately examined large investments and partnerships across generative AI, including their effects on market access, governance and competition for essential AI inputs.
The acquisition report arrives as Nvidia publicly emphasizes the role of models that organizations can inspect, adapt and run on their chosen infrastructure. In July, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said open models give countries, companies and researchers greater control over how they inspect, adapt, secure and deploy AI systems. .
Hugging Face would give Nvidia a more direct position in that ecosystem. Closed-model developers such as OpenAI and Anthropic operate their own platforms and are working to diversify the computing infrastructure behind their systems. A strong open-model market, meanwhile, can support demand from organizations that prefer to customize or operate models themselves, workloads that frequently run on Nvidia hardware.
Hugging Face also sits close to shifts in developer activity, including which model architectures, tools and deployment methods are gaining traction. If the acquisition proceeds, that vantage point could help Nvidia anticipate changing computing requirements and decide where to focus future hardware and software optimization. Neither company has indicated whether Hugging Face’s platform data or product signals would be used for that purpose.
