SANTA CLARA, CALIFORNIA / RankWire.AI / – Nvidia has reached a definitive agreement to acquire Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, the companies confirmed on Thursday. The deal was signed on September 2, 2026, with Nvidia set to pay approximately $11.9 billion to Hugging Face shareholders, subject to certain adjustments. Additionally, the transaction includes up to about $1 billion in equity-based retention awards for employees transitioning to Nvidia. The acquisition is anticipated to close in the first half of 2027, pending regulatory approval.
Hugging Face provides a widely utilized platform for creating, sharing, and deploying AI models, datasets, and applications. Nvidia indicated that over 18 million developers, researchers, and creators access the platform. It hosts more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets, and 1 million applications. Its services are adopted by more than 200,000 companies for discovering, evaluating, customizing, and deploying AI systems. The platform has grown to become a key hub for open-source and open-weight AI development.
Nvidia confirmed that Hugging Face will continue to be open to developers working with various models, frameworks, cloud providers, and computing platforms. Nvidia hardware will not be mandatory for building or deploying AI through Hugging Face. The platform will sustain support for open-source and open-weight models from diverse developers. Nvidia also stated that Hugging Face will support multiple cloud services and accelerator platforms, ensuring ongoing access for developers using hardware from other semiconductor vendors.
Deal safeguards Hugging Face’s open platform
Hugging Face was founded in 2016 by French entrepreneurs Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf. The company offers software libraries alongside its model and dataset hosting services. During its last disclosed funding round in August 2023, Hugging Face was valued at $4.5 billion and secured $235 million from technology investors. Prior to the acquisition, Nvidia and Hugging Face collaborated on various projects, including initiatives that allowed developers to access Nvidia’s computing infrastructure via familiar Hugging Face tools.
Nvidia filed the definitive agreement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in a Form 8-K on September 3, confirming that the acquisition has not yet finalized. Closing depends on usual conditions and regulatory clearances. Nvidia reaffirmed its commitment to maintaining Hugging Face’s open platform according to current practices, including the ability to upload and download selected models and datasets, along with ongoing support for silicon vendors other than Nvidia.
Pending regulatory approvals required before finalization
Nvidia has already established a significant presence on the Hugging Face platform through its open AI releases, publishing over 500 models and more than 250 open datasets. The company also develops libraries and tools that developers can modify, utilize, and expand. Hugging Face offers infrastructure catering to researchers, companies, and individual developers working in AI, providing services such as model hosting, datasets, software tools, and cloud-based resources for building and deploying AI applications.
The $12.93 billion Nvidia-Hugging Face deal remains pending until the completion conditions are fulfilled. Nvidia indicated that Hugging Face will continue supporting models across the AI landscape post-acquisition. Developers will still have choices regarding models, frameworks, clouds, inference providers, and computing platforms, based on the commitments made. Support for multi-cloud and multi-accelerator development and deployment will persist, with Nvidia expecting the transaction to conclude in the first half of 2027 after obtaining all necessary regulatory approvals.