Nvidia has agreed to acquire Hugging Face, a developer platform hosting a large library of open-source AI models and data sets, for nearly $13 billion. The companies made the deal official on September 4, 2026, after weeks of speculation.
Hugging Face, founded a decade ago by three French entrepreneurs in New York City, began as an AI companion app before pivoting to developer tools. It grew into a widely used platform where developers can freely share source code, data sets, and large language models. The company had raised nearly $400 million in venture capital funding as of December 2025, backed by firms including Sequoia Ventures, Coatue, and Lux Capital.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang framed the acquisition as an extension of the company’s open-source commitments. “Open models let startups, businesses, universities and public institutions build on advanced capabilities without training every model from scratch,” Huang said in the announcement. “AI advances faster when people can build together.” Nvidia committed to maintaining Hugging Face’s current open standards as part of the deal.
Hugging Face cofounder and CEO Clément Delangue said in a post on X that open-source AI needs “more compute, more support, more collaboration and more visibility” to scale, suggesting the acquisition addresses those gaps.
The deal extends Nvidia’s reach beyond hardware. The chipmaker already offers a suite of open-weights AI models called Nemotron, and earlier in 2026 rallied more than 80 companies to sign an open letter asking the US government to support open-weight AI models. Nvidia also launched an initiative called SAFE — Shared AI Findings Exchange — to help tech companies identify and address AI safety risks.
The acquisition may reflect broader competitive pressures. As major cloud providers and AI labs develop their own custom chips, Nvidia has been expanding its software offerings to keep developers building on its platforms — and owning Hugging Face’s repository of models and tools could deepen that hold.
Source: WIRED