Nvidia’s $12.9B Hugging Face buy puts a European-founded AI pillar fully in US hands

Nvidia has bought Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, turning one of open-source AI’s key platforms into a US-owned asset. The deal was confirmed by Hugging Face co-founder and CEO Clément Delangue, who said it was finalised on September 2, 2026. He also said the talks with Nvidia chief Jensen Huang began only a few weeks ago.

Hugging Face has spent roughly a decade as a kind of shared meeting point for open models. Founded in New York in 2016 by Delangue, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf, all French, the platform now hosts more than one million open-weight models and datasets and says it has 18 million registered builders. That makes it a central stop for systems like Llama and Mistral before they reach developers.

The deal also deepens Nvidia’s reach in Europe. Delangue said Nvidia will make further investments in Mistral and Black Forest Labs, both Hugging Face companies in Europe. Nvidia already held shares in both, so this is less a new relationship than a tighter grip on one that already existed. In 2023, Nvidia joined Hugging Face’s $235 million Series D, and earlier this year it had a $500 million offer rejected before coming back with a full acquisition.

What happens next may matter more than the ownership headline. Nvidia’s Justin Boitano said the company has an incentive to keep the platform open, pointing to open inference frameworks such as vLLM and SGLang that let different hardware makers work with the same model weights. Delangue made a similar argument, saying that if people dislike how Hugging Face is run, they can fork it. Still, Nvidia now controls a platform that much of the open-model ecosystem depends on, and Europe’s leading AI labs are going to have to live with that.