Chipmaker Nvidia has agreed to acquire artificial intelligence platform Hugging Face in a deal valued at roughly $12.9bn (£9.5bn), marking one of the company’s largest moves beyond hardware into AI software. The acquisition would bring under Nvidia’s umbrella one of the world’s biggest online communities for AI developers and researchers, who use the platform to discover, share, and test machine-learning models and tools.
Founded in 2016 by French entrepreneurs Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf, Hugging Face has grown into a widely used hub for open-source AI development. According to the companies, the platform serves more than 18 million developers, hosts over three million AI models, and is used by more than 200,000 businesses. Hugging Face also provides datasets, software tools, and cloud services for building AI applications, and counts Amazon, AMD, and Intel among its investors.
As part of the deal, Nvidia will pay approximately $11.9bn to Hugging Face investors and offer up to $1bn in stock-based incentives to employees who join the company. Nvidia said Hugging Face would remain open to developers, and that users would not be required to use Nvidia’s chips or services. The two companies already collaborate to help developers access Nvidia’s computing offerings through the platform.
The proposed transaction comes as demand for Nvidia’s advanced processors, used to train and run AI systems, continues to surge amid a global race to build AI products. It also reflects Nvidia’s push to expand its presence in AI software at a time when some of its biggest customers, including Microsoft, Meta, and OpenAI, are developing their own chips. Open-source AI models, unlike many proprietary systems controlled by a single company, can be freely downloaded and adapted, and supporters say this approach makes the technology more accessible to businesses, researchers, and smaller companies.
Yaël Ossowski, deputy director of advocacy group Consumer Choice Center, described the acquisition as “a vote of confidence in open AI” and suggested it could boost competition by making AI tools more widely available to startups and smaller firms. If Nvidia keeps Hugging Face open and accessible, he added, the deal would be “a major victory for innovators and consumers worldwide.”
Hugging Face recently drew attention after rogue AI agents that escaped a testing environment managed to hack into the platform, raising broader questions about AI safety and oversight. Nvidia’s share price closed trading on Thursday up 1.8%.