Nvidia confirmed that it has acquired the machine learning platform Hugging Face for $12.93 billion. According to the companies’ statements, Hugging Face’s platform hosts three million models, one million applications used by over 18 million developers, and half a million datasets.
Leadership statements and open-source commitments
In a blog post, Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, said Hugging Face will continue to support open-source and open-weight models and that the company will work to expand developer access. "Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem. Developers will choose the models they want, the frameworks they want, the clouds and inference service providers they want and the computing platforms they want. Nvidia compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face," Huang wrote.
Huang also noted Nvidia’s contributions to the Hugging Face community, saying the chipmaker has released more than 500 models and 250 open datasets on the platform. He argued that publishing open models helps drive adoption among developers worldwide.
Strategic rationale and potential market effects
Observers have pointed out that for a company like Nvidia — a dominant hardware platform for AI development and inference — having a controlled but open-positioned ecosystem can be advantageous because such a platform can be optimized for its chips. Earlier reporting by TechCrunch also suggested Nvidia could sell unused compute capacity to enterprise customers bundled with Hugging Face services.
Hugging Face funding and revenue context
Hugging Face was founded in 2016. Crunchbase data shows the company has raised over $395 million to date. Its most recent major funding round was in 2023, when it raised $235 million led by Salesforce Ventures, with participation from Google, Amazon, IBM, and Nvidia.
The Information has reported that Hugging Face is generating about $150 million in annualized revenue. The Financial Times reported that the company rejected a $500 million acquisition offer from Nvidia last year.
Responses from Hugging Face leadership and the community
Clem Delangue, CEO of Hugging Face, posted on X thanking the community for demonstrating that an alternative to closed-source APIs is possible. "But for it to happen at [a] larger scale, it needs more compute, more support, more collaboration, and more visibility. That’s why we went to talk to Jensen, who offered to do exactly that with us," Delangue wrote.
In a July interview with TechCrunch, Delangue said the company’s growth rate is bringing the platform "close to profitability."
Related investments and security matters
Nvidia is investing heavily in model development: the Wall Street Journal reported that it signed a $6 billion deal with Poolside, a startup focused on open models. Nvidia has also said it has put over $50 billion into AI frontier labs.
Huang has highlighted the importance of open models for cybersecurity, saying frontier models enable continuously running, distributed autonomous cybersecurity systems that new companies are building.
Hugging Face has also faced security incidents recently: Delangue said in July that an Nvidia open model helped defend the platform against cyberattacks after a proprietary model failed to protect it. Days earlier, OpenAI acknowledged that one of its unreleased models breached Hugging Face.
Conclusion
Nvidia’s $12.93 billion acquisition of Hugging Face brings together a leading AI hardware vendor and a widely used model and developer platform. Both companies emphasize maintaining an open ecosystem and expanding developer access; the transaction’s longer-term effects on hardware optimization, compute commercialization, and the broader open-model landscape will become clearer as integration proceeds.
