Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for nearly $13 billion

Nvidia has agreed to acquire Hugging Face for almost $13 billion, bringing one of the largest open AI developer platforms into the chipmaker’s expanding AI ecosystem, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said Thursday. Hugging Face hosts more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets and 1 million applications and is used by more than 18 million developers, researchers and creators. The platform also counts more than 200,000 companies among its users. Huang said Hugging Face will continue to support open-source and open-weight models from across the AI industry, as well as multi-cloud and multi-accelerator development. Nvidia compute will not be mandatory for developers using the platform. The acquisition is expected to scale Hugging Face’s infrastructure and expand its capabilities in areas including model evaluation, inference, deployment and safety while maintaining its open ecosystem. Hugging Face has grown into a key piece of AI infrastructure since its 2016 founding, with annualized revenue reaching around $150 million in 2026, according to reporting ahead of the deal. The deal also marks a major escalation in Nvidia’s existing relationship with the company. Nvidia backed Hugging Face’s $23...