Nvidia Completes $12.9B Hugging Face Acquisition

Nvidia has finalized its acquisition of Hugging Face for approximately $12.9 billion, the company's largest deal in the artificial intelligence sector, with a public commitment to keep the popular model-sharing platform open to its community of developers and researchers. The announcement, made on September 3, 2026, resolves a key question about the future of the platform, which hosts nearly 3 million model repositories and is considered a central hub for open-source AI development. The acquisition, which was in advanced talks in late August and early September, includes a $1 billion retention package for Hugging Face employees. Nvidia, the world's most valuable chipmaker, is purchasing a platform often described as the "GitHub of machine learning," where researchers, startups, and major tech companies publish and collaborate on AI models. The deal's price tag sets a new benchmark for AI infrastructure, significantly surpassing Hugging Face's last known private valuation of $4.5 billion from a 2023 funding round. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has championed open-source AI as a way to prevent the ecosystem from being controlled by a small number of large companies.