Nvidia has agreed to buy AI startup Hugging Face for roughly $12.93 billion, putting the world's most important open-model hub under the same roof as the most dominant AI chip company on the planet, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Image via FTCEO Jensen Huang announced the deal on Thursday, a day after NVIDIA filed that it had signed a definitive agreement. The transaction includes about $11.9 billion for Hugging Face stockholders and an equity retention package of up to $1 billion for employees who join NVIDIA. Closing is expected in the first half of 2027, pending regulatory approvals.
Huang said NVIDIA will “scale Hugging Face’s platform, strengthen its infrastructure and expand access to AI for developers and institutions worldwide.” Hugging Face, he added, “will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem,” and NVIDIA compute will not be required to build or deploy on it.
Hugging Face - where people can find, publish, fine-tune, and deploy open-weight models, has over 18 million developers, researchers, and creators who have shared over 3 million models, 500,000 datasets, and one million applications. Over 200,000 companies us
