SANTA CLARA, CALIFORNIA / RankWire.AI / – Nvidia announced on Thursday its agreement to purchase Hugging Face in a definitive deal valued at $12.93 billion. The signing of the agreement took place on September 2, 2026. Nvidia will pay roughly $11.9 billion to Hugging Face shareholders, subject to certain adjustments. The deal also includes as much as about $1 billion in equity-based retention awards for employees who join Nvidia. The transaction is anticipated to conclude in the first half of 2027, pending the approval of relevant regulatory bodies.
Hugging Face is known for its extensively used platform dedicated to developing, sharing, and deploying artificial intelligence models, datasets, and applications. Nvidia reports that more than 18 million developers, researchers, and creators utilize this platform. It hosts over 3 million models, 500,000 datasets, and 1 million applications. Its services are also adopted by more than 200,000 companies for discovering, evaluating, customizing, and deploying AI systems. The platform has established itself as a key hub for open-source and open-weight AI development.
Nvidia emphasized that Hugging Face will continue to support developers using various models, frameworks, cloud providers, and computing platforms. Hardware from Nvidia will not be mandated for building or deploying through Hugging Face. The platform will sustain its support for open-source and open-weight models from different developers. Nvidia also stated that Hugging Face will uphold compatibility with multiple cloud services and accelerator platforms, including ongoing access for developers utilizing hardware from other semiconductor companies.
Deal Ensures Hugging Face’s Open Platform Remains Unrestricted
Founded in 2016 by French entrepreneurs Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf, Hugging Face developed software libraries alongside its model and dataset hosting services. During its last publicly disclosed funding round in August 2023, the company was valued at $4.5 billion and raised $235 million from technology investors. Prior to the acquisition, Nvidia and Hugging Face collaborated on projects that provided developers access to Nvidia’s computing infrastructure through familiar Hugging Face tools.
The definitive agreement was disclosed by Nvidia in a Form 8-K filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on September 3. The filing confirms that the acquisition has not yet been finalized, as it requires customary closing conditions and regulatory approvals. Nvidia reaffirmed its commitment to keeping the Hugging Face platform open under existing practices, including the ability to upload and download selected models and datasets. It also guarantees continued support for hardware from vendors other than Nvidia.
Regulatory Clearance Still Pending Before Closure
Nvidia has already established a significant presence on the Hugging Face platform through its open AI releases, publishing over 500 models and more than 250 open datasets. The company also develops libraries and tools that developers can modify, build upon, and use. Hugging Face offers infrastructure for researchers, companies, and independent developers involved in AI, providing model hosting, datasets, software tools, and cloud resources for building and deploying AI applications.
The $12.93 billion Nvidia-Hugging Face deal remains pending until the necessary closing conditions are fulfilled. Nvidia has assured that Hugging Face will continue supporting models from across the AI ecosystem after the deal’s completion. Developers will maintain freedom of choice regarding models, frameworks, clouds, inference providers, and computing platforms under the announced commitments. The platform will persist in supporting multi-cloud and multi-accelerator deployment and development. Nvidia expects the acquisition to close in the first half of 2027 once all regulatory approvals are obtained.