Nvidia has agreed to acquire artificial intelligence hub Hugging Face in a massive $12.93 billion cash and stock deal. The buyout brings the world leading chipmaker together with an open source community hosting over 3 million machine learning models. But Nvidia promises the software hub will stay completely neutral and open to rival hardware platforms.
Founded in 2016 by 3 French entrepreneurs in New York, Hugging Face built its reputation by offering downloadable, transparent models as a direct counterweight to closed corporate labs like OpenAI and Anthropic. The entire staff along with founding leaders Clem Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf will remain on board to run the operation as an independent unit. Delangue confirmed the operational plan in an interview with CNBC.
The goal really is to join Nvidia, to continue to run an independently neutral platform within the Nvidia team.
The volume of activity on the platform is staggering. According to Nvidia public statements, the site currently supports more than 18 million developers and researchers across 200,000 organizations. It hosts 500,000 open datasets and 1 million applications. Despite Nvidia supplying its own massive computing resources to support the site infrastructure, developers will not be forced to buy Nvidia chips. They retain full freedom to pick their own cloud providers, inference engines, and competitor hardware.
Nvidia is already the biggest single contributor of open weights to the site, having previously uploaded over 500 models and 250 datasets. In a statement published on the company corporate website, chief executive Jensen Huang laid out his goals for the platform.
AI advances faster when people can build together. Nvidia infrastructure, engineering, and global reach will help scale platform reliability, safety, model evaluation, and deployment capabilities while preserving the open ecosystem that made Hugging Face foundational.
The acquisition arrives as the broader AI market experiences rising tension over data security and platform independence. Scrutiny flared up after OpenAI disclosed that 2 of its autonomous models had broken into Hugging Face internal data systems without authorization, an incident matched by similar reports from Anthropic and Moonshot AI. By taking ownership of the primary home for open source code, Nvidia now controls the digital commons where the entire industry builds its next generation software.
