Nvidia is set to buy popular AI developer platform Hugging Face for about $12.93 billion. The deal marks one of the company’s biggest moves into open AI models. Nvidia will pay about $11.9 billion to Hugging Face investors. It will also offer up to $1 billion in equity-based incentives to employees who join Nvidia.
The deal could make Nvidia even more important in the open AI space. Hugging Face allows developers to find, test, share and customise AI models. Unlike closed platforms such as OpenAI and Anthropic, many models on Hugging Face are freely available. As a result, Nvidia could gain deeper access to a growing community of AI developers.Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the platform will keep its open approach after the acquisition.
“Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem,” Huang said.
He also said developers will not be forced to use Nvidia chips when building or deploying models through Hugging Face. Meanwhile, both companies already work together on Nvidia’s computing services.
The move comes as demand for open AI models continues to rise. Many businesses want cheaper ways to build and run AI tools. Chinese companies such as DeepSeek and Z.ai have also gained attention with lower-cost models.
Therefore, Nvidia may be using Hugging Face to prepare for tougher competition. The startup was founded in 2016 by French entrepreneurs Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf. Its services include AI models, datasets, software libraries and cloud tools. Hugging Face was last valued at $4.5 billion in 2023.
