AI
Nvidia in advanced talks to acquire Hugging Face for $12.9 billion
The chip giant is moving to buy the popular open-source AI model hub as it seeks to shore up its market position against rival labs building their own silicon.
TechCrunch — AI
Nvidia appears poised to acquire Hugging Face, the widely-used platform where developers distribute and access open-source AI models, for approximately $12.9 billion, according to reporting from The Information. The deal would represent a dramatic valuation jump for the seven-year-old company, which last raised funding at a $4.5 billion valuation in 2023.
Neither Nvidia nor Hugging Face has publicly confirmed the agreement, and sources suggest talks could still fall apart. However, the company's CEO has recently become a vocal advocate for Nvidia's open-source agenda.
Why Nvidia wants in on open-source AI#
The acquisition would serve a critical strategic purpose for Nvidia: protecting its dominance in the AI hardware market. Major players like OpenAI, Google, Amazon, and Anthropic are all investing heavily in custom silicon to reduce dependence on Nvidia's chips. By acquiring Hugging Face, Nvidia would gain leverage in the open-source ecosystem — creating more AI alternatives to proprietary labs and keeping customers tethered to its hardware.
The company has already committed tens of billions of dollars to developing its own open-source models, making an acquisition of the hub where these projects live a natural extension of that strategy.
A CEO aligned with Nvidia's vision#
Hugging Face Chief Executive Clem Delangue has spent much of 2026 publicly championing open models. He recently appeared on CBS's "Face the Nation" and CNBC, referencing a letter signed by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and 24 other companies urging the U.S. government to support rather than restrict open-weight models. Delangue's public alignment with Nvidia's position has been notable as Washington officials debated potential curbs on open-source AI amid concerns that lower-cost Chinese models could challenge American systems.
Financial engineering and market expansion#
Beyond strategic positioning, the deal offers Nvidia multiple financial and operational benefits. The company has pledged to subsidize massive cloud computing commitments for customers — computing power that may go unused. Owning Hugging Face, which already rents computational resources to developers, would allow Nvidia to offload that excess capacity.
Additionally, the acquisition would give Nvidia a path back into cloud computing after scaling back its DGX Cloud business roughly a year ago. Hugging Face's existing customer base and infrastructure would provide an immediate foundation without requiring Nvidia to build from scratch.
