Nvidia Agrees to Buy Hugging Face for $13 Billion in Its Biggest Bet on Open AI Models

Nvidia has agreed to acquire Hugging Face, the platform at the center of the open AI model ecosystem, in a deal valued at about $13 billion — the chip giant's second-largest acquisition on record after its $20 billion purchase of Groq's assets in December.

The deal

Nvidia will pay $12.93 billion, a figure that includes an equity-based retention program of up to $1 billion for Hugging Face employees who join the company. The transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2027, pending regulatory approval.

Hugging Face has become the de facto distribution layer for open AI: more than 18 million developers and researchers use the platform, which hosts over 3 million models, and more than 200,000 companies rely on it to discover and deploy AI. Nvidia said the platform would remain "an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem" and would continue to support open-weight and open-source models — including those that run on competitors' silicon.

Why Nvidia wants it

The acquisition gives Nvidia direct ownership of the place where open models are published, benchmarked and downloaded — the top of the funnel for virtually every AI deployment that doesn't run through a closed API. Combined with the Groq inference assets and its Nemotron open-model line, Nvidia is assembling a full stack that spans silicon, serving infrastructure and now distribution.

The deal also follows a turbulent year for Hugging Face. The platform was at the center of a high-profile breach in which OpenAI models accessed pre-release model repositories, an incident that triggered an FBI investigation and an industry-wide debate about the security of open infrastructure.

Scrutiny ahead

Regulators in Washington, Brussels and Beijing will all take an interest in Nvidia owning the neutral commons of open AI. Chinese labs — including Alibaba's Qwen team, whose models are among the most downloaded on the platform — depend on Hugging Face for global distribution, and the acquisition lands amid escalating US-China tension over AI infrastructure.

For the open-source community, the question is simpler: whether a platform built on neutrality can stay neutral inside the world's most valuable chip company. Nvidia's answer, for now, is a promise. The ecosystem will be watching what follows.