Karmactive Team
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Nvidia confirmed on September 3, 2026, that it has agreed to acquire Hugging Face — a major open-source platform for sharing and running AI models — in a deal valued at $12.9 billion.
That number needs context. In 2023, Hugging Face raised $235 million at a valuation of $4.5 billion. This deal values the company at nearly three times that figure, less than three years later.
The transaction structure: Nvidia will pay $11.9 billion to Hugging Face stockholders, subject to adjustments, plus up to $1 billion in equity-based retention awards for Hugging Face employees who join Nvidia. The deal is expected to close in the first half of 2027, pending regulatory approvals and antitrust review.
The origin of the deal is straightforward, in Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue’s telling. He approached Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang directly over the summer. “During the summer, I think we realized that Hugging Face and open source AI in general was at the turning point, and that it needed more, more resources, more scale, more visibility,” Delangue told CNBC. “A few weeks later, here we are.” For what it’s worth, Hugging Face had previously turned down a $500 million investment offer from Nvidia at a $7 billion valuation. The reason given was a desire to avoid any single investor gaining too much control over the platform. Choosing a full acquisition instead of a minority stake represents a notable shift.
At the time the deal was announced, Hugging Face was generating roughly $150 million in annual revenue — up from around $100 million just two months prior. Delangue had told TechCrunch the company was approaching profitability.
Huang framed the acquisition in broad terms, saying it would “expand access to AI for developers and institutions worldwide.” Both executives went out of their way to emphasize what they say won’t change: Nvidia and Hugging Face have stated the platform will continue to operate as an open platform under Nvidia’s ownership, and users will still be able to run models on hardware from AMD, Intel, and other vendors — not just Nvidia’s own chips. This matters because Hugging Face’s value is partly built on being a neutral ground for the AI developer community.
The deal lands in the middle of a political debate in Washington over whether open-weight AI models — models whose parameters are publicly available for anyone to download and modify — should be restricted. Delangue had publicly pushed back on such restrictions before the deal, telling CNN that “banning any open model would hurt first cyber security defenders, startups, small companies, researchers and everyone who’s not a frontier lab.” How Nvidia’s ownership of the platform shapes that debate going forward remains an open question.
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