Nvidia reportedly agrees to buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion
Nvidia has reportedly agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, according to The Information. The report, published on August 26, cites a person with knowledge of the agreement. Neither Nvidia nor Hugging Face had publicly confirmed the transaction in the reporting reviewed for this article, so the deal should be treated as reported rather than closed and independently verified. The original Digg item pointed to earlier reporting that Nvidia was seeking an acquisition; The Information’s later account describes an agreement at a specific price.
Hugging Face operates a central platform for sharing, discovering and running open-source AI models, datasets and development tools. Developers use its repositories and libraries to test models, adapt them for their own applications and deploy them across different kinds of hardware. The company also sells enterprise and cloud services. The Information says Hugging Face was generating about $150 million in annualized revenue, making the reported price a very large multiple of current sales.
The strategic logic is clear even before the final terms are known. Nvidia dominates the supply of AI accelerators, while Hugging Face sits close to the developers who choose, modify and deploy models. Owning that distribution and tooling layer could help Nvidia connect its hardware, software and open-model efforts more tightly. The Information reported that Nvidia sees successful open models as useful counterweights to closed AI labs working to reduce dependence on Nvidia hardware.
That combination also creates a governance question. Hugging Face has supported models and deployment options associated with Nvidia rivals, including AMD and Intel. If the acquisition proceeds, developers may ask whether the platform will remain neutral and whether competing hardware will receive equal support.
Nvidia previously invested in Hugging Face’s 2023 funding round, which valued the company at $4.5 billion. The Financial Times reported that Hugging Face later rejected a $500 million Nvidia investment at a $7 billion valuation. For businesses and makers, the immediate lesson is to distinguish a reported transaction from a completed one and to keep deployment options portable. If the deal closes, it could mark a significant shift in who controls the infrastructure connecting open AI research with commercial computing, while the practical impact will depend on the final terms and the platform’s treatment of its wider ecosystem.