Nvidia strikes $12.9bn deal for AI platform Hugging Face

December 2026 | DEALFRONT | MERGERS & ACQUISITIONS

Financier Worldwide Magazine

December 2026 Issue

Following a period of rumour and speculation, semiconductor giant Nvidia announced in September that it has agreed to buy artificial intelligence (AI) platform Hugging Face in a deal valued at about $12.9bn.

Under the terms of the deal, Nvidia will pay about $11.9bn to Hugging Face investors while offering an equity-based retention programme worth up to $1bn for employees who join Nvidia.

The deal, one of Nvidia’s biggest acquisitions as it expands further into software and AI infrastructure, is expected to close in the first half of 2027, pending regulatory approval.

Upon completion, Hugging Face will remain open to developers and users will not be required to use Nvidia chips or services, according to the company.

Hugging Face was founded in 2016 by French entrepreneurs Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf. Based in New York, the company is backed by investors including Intel, Advanced Micro Devices and Amazon. Beyond hosting AI models, it provides datasets, software libraries and cloud services used to build and deploy AI applications.

The company was valued at $4.5bn in its last disclosed funding round in August 2023, when it raised $235m from investors. According to Crunchbase, Hugging Face has raised more than $395m in funding to date. The Information has reported that the business is generating roughly $150m in annualised revenue.

“As the opportunity for open models accelerates, Hugging Face can serve the global AI community at unprecedented scale,” said Jensen Huang, president and chief executive of Nvidia in a blog post announcing the deal. “Nvidia’s infrastructure, engineering and global reach can help improve platform reliability, safety, model evaluation, inference and deployment capabilities, while preserving the open ecosystem that made Hugging Face foundational.

Mr Huang said he was pleased that Mr Delangue viewed Nvidia as the right steward for Hugging Face, its community and the future of open models. Sharing that vision, he said the team would bring its expertise and well-known brand to a much larger platform. He also thanked the millions of developers using the service and said the combined organisation would work with them to broaden access to AI while improving its capabilities for people and institutions worldwide.

“We think we’re at the inflection point for Hugging Face and open source AI in general,” said Mr Delangue, co-founder and chief executive of Hugging Face. “We think with the resources, support, and the long-term approach of Nvidia, we’ll be able to do basically what we’ve been doing for the past 10 years – meaning, supporting the open source AI community – but to the next level at a much bigger scale.”

The companies have worked together for several years to help developers access Nvidia’s computing services through the platform. According to the companies, Hugging Face is used by more than 18 million developers and hosts more than 3 million AI models, 500,000 datasets and 1 million applications. More than 200,000 companies use the platform.

Nvidia says it is the largest contributor of open models and data to Hugging Face, having released more than 500 models and over 250 open datasets through the platform.

The acquisition is expected to strengthen Nvidia’s position within the growing open source AI ecosystem at a time when several major technology companies, including Meta, OpenAI and Microsoft, are investing heavily in alternative AI infrastructure and custom chip development.

Hugging Face also brings a well-established platform for sharing models, datasets and applications, giving Nvidia deeper engagement with researchers, startups and enterprise users across a broad range of AI projects.

The deal gives Nvidia access to a vast community of developers and researchers, supporting its expansion into software, AI tools and open-source technologies while strengthening its role across the wider AI ecosystem.

Richard Summerfield