Nvidia’s potential $13B acquisition of Hugging Face raises concerns for European tech

Nvidia is reportedly in talks to acquire Hugging Face, the open-source AI platform that has become something like GitHub for machine learning models, in a deal valued at roughly $13 billion. If completed, it would be the chipmaker’s largest acquisition ever and would hand one company control over both the chips that train AI models and the marketplace where millions of developers share them. The deal in context Hugging Face was last valued at $4.5 billion during a 2023 funding round. A $13 billion acquisition would represent roughly a 3x jump from that figure. The company hosts more than 2 million public models and over 500,000 datasets. Its user base has swelled to around 13 million. And its annualized revenue hit approximately $150 million as of 2025, putting the proposed deal at an eye-watering 86-fold revenue multiple. The deal would dwarf Nvidia’s previous record acquisition. Its $7 billion purchase of Mellanox in 2020, a networking technology company, was considered bold at the time. This one nearly doubles it. Why Europe is nervous Hugging Face was founded in 2016 by Clément Delangue, Thomas Wolf, and Julien Chaumond. While the company is headquartered in New York, its roots...