NVIDIA announced on September 3, 2026, that it has reached a definitive agreement to acquire Hugging Face, the prominent platform for sharing and testing AI models, in a transaction valued at $12.93 billion. The acquisition follows weeks of industry speculation regarding the future of the repository, which has served as a central hub for the open-source AI community since the generative AI boom began in 2022.
The platform currently hosts over 3 million models, 500,000 datasets, and 1 million applications, utilized by more than 18 million developers and 200,000 companies. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang stated that the company intends to scale the platform's infrastructure and improve its global reach, while maintaining the site's existing brand and open-access model.
Despite the acquisition, NVIDIA emphasized that the platform will remain open to the broader AI ecosystem. Developers will retain the ability to choose their preferred frameworks, cloud providers, and computing platforms. According to the company, the use of NVIDIA hardware will not be a requirement for building or deploying models through the repository, which will continue to support multi-cloud and multi-accelerator environments.
NVIDIA has been a long-term investor in Hugging Face, participating in funding rounds as early as 2023. The company is currently the largest contributor of open models and datasets to the platform, having released more than 500 models and 250 datasets to date. Other previous investors in the startup include Google, Amazon, Salesforce, AMD, Intel, IBM, and Qualcomm.
The move positions NVIDIA to exert significant influence over both the physical infrastructure and the software repositories that power modern AI development. Analysts suggest that as open-weight and open-source models gain traction alongside proprietary systems, the integration of Hugging Face into NVIDIA's portfolio could solidify the company's role in shaping the future of AI accessibility and deployment.