Nvidia reportedly acquires AI project hosting platform Hugging Face for $12.9B
SiliconANGLE Maria Deutscher ● Covered by 5 sources
Nvidia reportedly bought Hugging Face for $12.9B. That gives the chip giant a bigger grip on the tools developers use to build and host AI models.
Based on reporting by SiliconANGLE, Maria Deutscher — 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. The deal would pull one of the best-known hubs for open-source AI work under the control of the company that sells the chips much of that work runs on. The news followed earlier reports that Hugging Face had drawn interest from multiple buyers, with Salesforce also said to have explored a takeover.
Hugging Face is not a small side project. It launched in 2016 with a chatbot aimed at teens, then moved into open source two years later by releasing a framework for building AI apps. By 2020, it had turned into the GitHub-like home for AI models that most people know it for now. Today it hosts more than 2 million models, plus tens of thousands of free training datasets, Spaces and other tools.
The company also makes money from paid products. Hugging Face Hub gives software teams private repositories and extra cybersecurity controls. Inference Endpoints lets developers host inference workloads without the weeks of setup usually needed for AI infrastructure, and it can autoscale when demand rises. Hugging Face has also built some models of its own, including a 3 billion-parameter language model released in 2025 and BLOOM, which was trained using donated time on a French supercomputer.
For Nvidia, the point is obvious. The company already uses Hugging Face for its own open-source AI projects, and a purchase would put it deeper into the stack than chips alone. The platform says more than 13 million developers rely on it for models and datasets, so controlling that layer could help Nvidia line up the product roadmap with its own business. It would also add pressure on rivals in the model-access business, especially after Stripe’s reported $7.5 billion deal for OpenRouter last week.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is what platform power looks like when it grows up and buys the tools everyone else needs. Nvidia already sits at the center of AI hardware; owning Hugging Face would be the sort of tidy vertical grab that makes open-source look a lot less independent. Closed-model fans will call it strategy. Everyone else will call it consolidation with better branding.
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