Nvidia Reaches $12.9B Agreement to Acquire AI Platform Hugging Face

Nvidia Corp. has agreed to buy Hugging Face Inc., the startup operating the prominent open-source artificial intelligence model platform, for $12.9 billion, according to reports. The deal gives the semiconductor giant direct control over a pivotal software hub used by millions of AI developers.

Speculation around a potential transaction began earlier in the week when Business Insider reported that Hugging Face had drawn acquisition interest from several suitors, including Salesforce Inc. The Information later reported that Nvidia secured the agreement following Salesforce's initial takeover inquiry, in details highlighted by SiliconANGLE.

Established in 2016 as a teenage chatbot application, Hugging Face pivoted in 2018 by releasing an open-source framework for building artificial intelligence tools. In 2020, the company debuted its core hosting platform, establishing a repository infrastructure for open-source AI models analogous to GitHub.

The platform now hosts more than 2 million AI models along with tens of thousands of public training datasets and community-built applications known as Spaces. Nvidia itself is among the corporate entities that currently utilize Hugging Face to distribute open-source AI research and software tools.

Hugging Face generates revenue primarily through subscription offerings, including Hugging Face Hub, which grants enterprise software teams access to private code repositories and heightened cybersecurity controls. Additionally, the company provides Inference Endpoints, a commercial service that automates hardware scaling and eliminates standard setup overhead for deployment workloads.

Beyond platform services, Hugging Face has built its own proprietary algorithms. The organization previously trained BLOOM, a 176-billion-parameter model, using donated processing time on a French supercomputer. In 2025, it launched a 3-billion-parameter language model designed to surpass rival algorithms of comparable scale.

The acquisition deepens Nvidia's integration across the broader AI software stack, providing direct influence over a platform used by more than 13 million developers. The move also highlights growing consolidation among AI infrastructure providers, following Stripe Inc.'s reported $7.5 billion acquisition of model marketplace startup OpenRouter Inc. the previous week.