Nvidia to Acquire Hugging Face for $12.93 Billion

Nvidia has agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, bringing one of the most popular platforms for open-source AI models, datasets, and applications under the chipmaker's ownership. CEO Jensen Huang announced the deal in a blog post on Thursday, September 3.



Hugging Face, founded in 2016 and often described as the GitHub for AI, hosts more than 3 million models, 1 million applications, and 500,000 datasets. More than 18 million developers, researchers, and creators use the platform, while over 200,000 companies rely on it to discover, evaluate, customize, and deploy AI.


Despite the change in ownership, the platform will remain open. Developers will be able to choose the models, frameworks, clouds, inference providers, and computing platforms they want, and Nvidia compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face. The platform will also continue supporting open-source and open-weight models from across the ecosystem, along with multi-cloud and multi-accelerator development and deployment.

Nvidia says it is the largest contributor of open models and data to Hugging Face, having released more than 500 models and 250 open datasets on the platform. Huang, who recently coauthored an industry letter on the importance of open weights, said the companies will scale Hugging Face, strengthen its infrastructure, and expand access to AI for developers and institutions worldwide.



Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue said in a post on X that scaling an open alternative to closed-source APIs requires more compute, support, collaboration, and visibility, which is why the company approached Huang. Last year, Hugging Face rejected a $500 million offer from Nvidia, according to the Financial Times.

The startup has raised more than $395 million to date, according to Crunchbase, including a $235 million round in 2023 led by Salesforce Ventures with participation from Google, Amazon, IBM, and Nvidia. The Information reported last month that Hugging Face is generating $150 million in annualized revenue, while Delangue said in July that its growth rate was bringing the company close to profitability.