It's Official: NVIDIA Buys AI Hub Hugging Face For $12.9 Billion

What was reported as an industry rumor last week is now official. NVIDIA has formally announced it has agreed to acquire Hugging Face, the open-source AI community's primary hub, for $12.93 billion and change ($12,930,300,000, to be precise). The official blog post confirms the figure that was floating around late last month, and it represents one of the largest acquisitions in NVIDIA's history.

It also marks another notable push beyond silicon dominance. Hugging Face currently serves as the global directory for open-source AI, hosting millions of models, datasets, and applications for over 18 million registered developers and 200,000 enterprise organizations.

🤗💚https://t.co/coHXLgzNXh pic.twitter.com/Ju5e0R4roZ

— Hugging Face (@huggingface) September 3, 2026

A primary concern when rumors of the acquisition first surfaced was whether NVIDIA would restrict the platform to favor its own CUDA stack and hardware. Last year, Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue notably turned down a $500 million investment from NVIDIA that would have valued the firm at $7 billion. Delangue has been clear on his stance that the "concentration of power is the biggest risk in AI." So, what changed?

NVIDIA’s announcement explicitly pledges to maintain Hugging Face’s status as an open, vendor-neutral hub. Developers will retain full freedom to choose their preferred hardware, cloud providers, and inference frameworks, with no requirements to run workloads on NVIDIA silicon.

"Recently, I coauthored an open letter on the importance of open weights to the AI economy. Joined by leaders from across the industry, we made a simple point: open weights broaden access to AI and help ensure that AI leadership is distributed across companies, institutions, and communities," Huang stated in a blog post confirming the acquisition agreement.

Promoting the open-weight AI model is what drove Huang to join the social media platform X in late July, where he has since amassed over 1 million followers. His first post was to share the aforementioned letter, which is also signed by several other titans of tech, such as Dell, IBM, Meta, Microsoft, Mozilla, and Perplexity.

Exciting day for NVIDIA and @huggingface.

Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty. They allow every developer, startup, university, industry and country to build with, customize and benefit from AI.

Thank you…

— Jensen Huang (@JensenHuang) September 3, 2026

Huang continued that messaging in today's blog post announcing the deal, saying NVIDIA is the largest contributor of open models and data to Hugging Face.

"As the opportunity for open models accelerates, Hugging Face can serve the global AI community at unprecedented scale. NVIDIA’s infrastructure, engineering and global reach can help improve platform reliability, safety, model evaluation, inference and deployment capabilities, while preserving the open ecosystem that made Hugging Face foundational," Huang added.