Nvidia agrees to buy Hugging Face for $12.9B, months after turning down its $500M offer: Report
Tech Funding News Sofia Chesnokova ● Covered by 2 sources
Nvidia has agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion after its earlier $500 million offer was rejected. That puts the main open AI model hub in the hands of the chip giant behind most of those models.
Based on reporting by Tech Funding News, Sofia Chesnokova — read the original for the full story.
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Nvidia has reached a deal to buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, according to The Information. That is a big jump from the $500 million investment offer Hugging Face turned down earlier, when that proposal would have valued the company at $7 billion.
The reason for the rejection was simple enough. Clément Delangue, Hugging Face’s co-founder and CEO, said on the TechCrunch Equity podcast that the company did not want any single investor to gain too much power. That instinct now looks a lot harder to preserve.
Hugging Face is not a toy startup anymore. Founded in New York in 2016 by Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf, it began as a chatbot for teenagers before shifting into open-source machine learning tools. It now has around 250 employees and hosts more than one million model repositories used by more than 15,000 companies. People call it the GitHub of AI for a reason: developers use it to access, fine-tune, and share models like Llama and Mistral without starting from scratch.
That neutrality has always been central to the company’s pitch. Hugging Face supports models and developers using hardware from Nvidia rivals including Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. Nvidia already supplies most of the chips used to train models on the platform, so this deal tightens its grip on a system that was supposed to stay open to everyone.
The company has been circling Hugging Face for a while. Nvidia took part in Hugging Face’s $235 million Series D round in 2023 alongside Google, Amazon, Salesforce, Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, and IBM, when the startup was valued at $4.5 billion. The new price is almost three times that. And it fits a larger buying spree: Nvidia also acquired Kumo, ShedMD, Illumex, and Groq last year, and this week said it is setting aside $18 billion for AI equity investments through 2026.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the oldest move in tech: buy the neutral platform, then call the result efficiency. Nvidia has every right to spend like a shop owner with a winning lottery ticket, but open AI infrastructure tends to go funny when the biggest hardware vendor also owns the storefront. Rival chips and the startups built on openness should be paying close attention, because neutrality rarely survives a balance sheet this large.
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