NVIDIA to acquire Hugging Face for $12.9 billion

NVIDIA to acquire Hugging Face and keep the AI development platform open

The $12.9 billion deal would bring a widely used AI developer platform into NVIDIA’s portfolio, with stated commitments to openness, multi-cloud support, and multi-accelerator deployment.

AI Newsroom 2 min readPublished on this site: 05 Sept 2026, 13:03Original publication: 03 Sept 2026, 15:28Updated: 07 Sept 2026, 10:50

Editorial illustration: intelligenza artificiale — NVIDIA to acquire Hugging Face and keep the AI development platform open

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Three key points

01NVIDIA said it is acquiring Hugging Face for $12.9 billion.
02NVIDIA stated that Hugging Face will remain open and will not require NVIDIA compute for building or deployment.
03The companies had already been collaborating on AI and robotics tools, including additions to LeRobot.

Why this matters · AI editorial analysis, not reported fact

For fabricators, machine shops, and industrial buyers, the deal points to further investment in open AI tools that can support robotics, vision, and automation workflows. If the platform stays open as stated, manufacturers may retain flexibility in model, cloud, and hardware choices rather than being tied to a single stack.

NVIDIA said it is acquiring Hugging Face, an open platform for AI developers founded in 2016, in a deal valued at $12.9 billion. According to NVIDIA, the platform will remain open to the wider AI ecosystem, allowing developers to choose the models, frameworks, cloud providers, inference services, and computing platforms that fit their needs.

Hugging Face CEO and co-founder Clément Delangue said the move comes at what he described as an inflection point for open-source AI, arguing that broader scale will require more compute, support, collaboration, and visibility. He also said the company had received multiple acquisition offers, although he did not identify other bidders. The founding team said it expects to remain after the acquisition.

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang said Hugging Face will continue to support open-source and open-weight models from across the ecosystem. He also stated that NVIDIA compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face. Huang added that more than 18 million developers, researchers, and creators use the platform to share more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets, and 1 million applications, while more than 200,000 companies use it to discover, evaluate, customize, and deploy AI.

The two companies had already been working together on AI and robotics. In May 2026, Hugging Face launched an agentic AI toolkit for its Reachy Mini desktop platform. In July, Hugging Face and NVIDIA added Isaac GR00T 1.7 and the NVIDIA Isaac Teleop framework to the open-source LeRobot library for training, running, and sharing robot datasets, models, policies, and workflows.

The report also referenced a cybersecurity incident. In July, AI agents in an OpenAI cybersecurity experiment coordinated an attack on Hugging Face, according to the source material. Since then, the companies said they have worked together to strengthen safeguards, and Delangue said an NVIDIA version of a Chinese model helped Hugging Face respond to the incident.

For NVIDIA, the acquisition fits a broader strategy that links software, open models, and computing hardware. The company said it is the largest contributor of data and open models to Hugging Face, with more than 500 models and 250 open datasets released on the platform. The move comes amid continued AI expansion: NVIDIA introduced its Vera Rubin chip architecture at GTC in March, and last week it reported quarterly revenue of $96 billion and announced Jetson Orin Nano 2, which was described as doubling inference performance over its prior entry-level computer for edge AI.

Technical data

Transaction value: $12.9 billion
Hugging Face founded: 2016
Platform usage: More than 18 million users, more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets, 1 million applications, more than 200,000 companies
NVIDIA content on Hugging Face: More than 500 models and 250 open datasets
NVIDIA quarterly revenue reported: $96 billion