According to The Information, Nvidia has agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion. The acquisition is expected to close in the first half of 2027, subject to antitrust review.
What Hugging Face brings
Hugging Face is one of the largest open-source AI model platforms. The company hosts 2.96 million public model repositories, roughly 1 million datasets, and 1.44 million Spaces. Its annualized revenue is about $150 million — implying a purchase price roughly 86 times that revenue figure.
Previous offer and the question of community independence
Last year, Hugging Face declined a $500 million investment proposal from Nvidia that implied a $7 billion valuation. At the time the company cited protecting the community from concentration of influence as a reason for turning the offer down.
This year Nvidia's proposal was for a full acquisition and valued the company at $12.9 billion; Hugging Face accepted. The gap between the earlier valuation and the new purchase price is $5.9 billion. The sequence highlights how statements about community independence intersect with market valuations and transaction economics.
Why this matters
The deal places a widely used model- and dataset-hosting platform under the ownership of a major hardware and software provider. That shift could affect access, licensing and governance of the resources hosted on Hugging Face, depending on how policies are handled post-closing.
Next steps
Closing the transaction requires antitrust clearance, and the parties expect the process to complete in the first half of 2027. Users, contributors and other ecosystem participants will likely monitor the outcome and any changes to platform rules or openness under Nvidia's ownership.
