Nvidia is making one of its biggest moves beyond computer chips, agreeing to acquire artificial intelligence platform Hugging Face for $12.93 billion.
The deal, announced on September 3, brings one of the world’s largest communities for open AI models and tools closer to the company that has become the central hardware supplier behind the AI boom.
Nvidia said the transaction will help scale Hugging Face’s platform, strengthen its infrastructure and expand access to AI for developers and institutions around the world. The company did not say that Hugging Face would become a closed Nvidia-only service.
Instead, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said Hugging Face would remain an open platform. Developers will continue to have the ability to choose the models, frameworks, cloud services and computing platforms they want to use.
That point is likely to matter to the developer community.
Hugging Face has built its reputation around making AI models and tools accessible to researchers and developers. According to Nvidia, more than 18 million developers, researchers and creators use the platform, which hosts more than three million models, 500,000 datasets and one million applications.
The acquisition gives Nvidia a much deeper connection with the people actually building AI applications.
For years, Nvidia’s biggest advantage has been its powerful graphics processors, which are widely used to train and run AI systems. The company is now pushing further into the software and developer ecosystem surrounding those chips, that Hugging Face deal fits strategy.
Nvidia has already been contributing models and datasets to the platform and has worked with Hugging Face to help developers use its computing services. Bringing the two companies under the same ownership could take that relationship much further.
The financial scale of the deal also stands out.
Nvidia said it has agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12,930,300,000. The transaction is one of Nvidia’s largest acquisitions as the company continues to use its enormous cash generation to expand its position across the rapidly growing AI industry.
Hugging Face was last valued at about $4.5 billion after a funding round in 2023. The company was founded in 2016 by Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf and initially became known for its work around natural-language AI before expanding into a much broader platform.
The company now sits at an important point in the AI ecosystem.
Open-weight models have become increasingly popular because developers can download, modify and run them instead of depending entirely on proprietary AI services. That has created a fast-growing alternative to closed systems operated by companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic.
Nvidia’s acquisition gives it a stronger position in that world, It also comes at a time when some of Nvidia’s biggest customers are working on their own AI chips. Companies including Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI are investing heavily in alternatives that could reduce their dependence on Nvidia hardware.
Owning a major developer platform could therefore become strategically valuable.
At the same time, the deal is likely to raise questions about how independent Hugging Face will remain under Nvidia.
Nvidia has promised that developers will not be required to use its chips to build or deploy through Hugging Face. Whether that openness remains unchanged over the long term will be watched closely by developers and competing chipmakers.
For now, Nvidia is presenting the acquisition as a way to make open AI bigger rather than narrower.
The message is clear: Nvidia no longer wants to be known only as the company supplying the chips for the AI revolution.
It wants a larger role in the software, models and developer community built around them.
