Nvidia Confirms $12.9 Billion Acquisition of Hugging Face

After weeks of swirling rumors, Nvidia confirmed today that it has acquired Hugging Face for $12.93 billion. Hugging Face's platform hosts three million models, one million applications used by over 18 million developers, and half a million datasets, making it one of the most significant hubs for AI development. In a blog post, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang stated that Hugging Face will continue to support open-source and open-weight models, with a focus on expanding developer access. "Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem," Huang wrote. "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 also highlighted Nvidia's contributions to the platform, noting that the company has released more than 500 models and 250 open datasets on Hugging Face. He argued that building open models is key to engaging developers worldwide. For Nvidia, a dominant hardware platform for AI development and inference, controlling an open ecosystem offers strategic advantages. It allows the company to create a platform optimized for its chips while also enabling it to sell unused computing capacity to enterprise customers, bundled with Hugging Face's offerings, as TechCrunch previously reported. Hugging Face was founded in 2016 and has raised over $395 million in funding to date, according to Crunchbase. Its last funding round was in 2023, when it raised $235 million led by Salesforce Ventures, with participation from Google, Amazon, IBM, and Nvidia. In a post on X, Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue thanked the community for showing that the company could be an alternative to closed-source APIs. "But for it to happen at [a] larger scale, it needs more compute, more support, more collaboration, and more visibility," Delangue wrote. "That's why we went to talk to Jensen, who offered to do exactly that with us." The acquisition marks a reversal from Hugging Face's earlier stance. Last year, the company rejected a $500 million deal from Nvidia, according to the Financial Times. However, the landscape has shifted: last month, The Information reported that Hugging Face is clocking $150 million in annualized revenue. In a July interview with TechCrunch, Delangue said that its growth rate is helping the platform get "close to profitability." Nvidia's Huang has been a strong proponent of open models. He recently co-signed a letter advocating for open-weight models to strengthen the US's position against rivals in the global AI race, underscoring the strategic importance of this acquisition in 2026.

via TechCrunch AI