Nvidia Could Acquire Hugging Face for $13 Billion
Trending Topics Georg Haas ● Covered by 2 sources
Rumor — unconfirmed reporting.
Nvidia may buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, if a reported deal pans out. It would tie the chip giant closer to open-source AI and maybe help it defend its own business.
Based on reporting by Trending Topics, Georg Haas — read the original for the full story.
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Nvidia has reportedly agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, according to The Information, which cited a person familiar with the matter. TechCrunch says no signed agreement has been reached yet. Neither company has said anything publicly. That silence stands out, TechCrunch noted, because Nvidia usually pushes back quickly when it thinks a report is wrong.
The target is a big one in open-source AI. Hugging Face, founded in 2016, is where a lot of developers go to share and grab open-source models. For Nvidia, owning that hub would be a strong move at a time when open-source developers are trying to close the gap with companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI. It would also help keep more of that ecosystem tied to Nvidia’s hardware.
That matters because the biggest closed AI labs are not sitting still. OpenAI, Google, Amazon and Anthropic are all building their own chips to rely less on Nvidia. If open-source models keep giving customers more choices, the market could stay more dependent on Nvidia’s servers and chips than on those in-house efforts. That is the strategic logic here: defend the hardware business by backing the software layer people use.
There is also a cloud angle. Nvidia scaled back DGX Cloud about a year ago, and buying Hugging Face could give it a quicker route back into cloud computing. The company has already agreed to share the costs of tens of billions of dollars in cloud deals for customers, which creates a risk if that capacity goes unused. Hugging Face could give Nvidia somewhere to sell that spare computing power.
The price would be a huge leap from Hugging Face’s last known valuation. In 2023, it raised $235 million at a $4.5 billion valuation, in a round led by Salesforce Ventures with participation from Alphabet’s GV, IBM Ventures and Nvidia itself. Nvidia also reportedly made a $500 million investment offer late last year that Hugging Face rejected because it did not want a dominant investor shaping its decisions. Most recently, the company reportedly had about $150 million in annual revenue, up from roughly $100 million just two months earlier, and it was said to be nearing profitability. Even so, nearly $13 billion would be a very large number for a business that size.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is what happens when open-source becomes strategically useful: the big chip company starts acting like a platform company with manners. From a European tech angle, it’s hard not to see the same pattern again — the infrastructure layer buys the community layer, then calls it synergy. Hugging Face has every reason to worry about being eaten by the very market it helped widen.
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