Nvidia Nears $13 Billion Deal to Acquire Open-Source AI Hub Hugging Face
Nvidia has agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, according to a report from The Information. Business Insider, which first reported the takeover interest over the weekend, notes that the talks value the company at more than $13 billion but have not yet produced a signed agreement, meaning the deal could still fall apart. Neither Nvidia nor Hugging Face responds to requests for comment, and Nvidia's silence stands out given its history of quickly rebutting reports it considers inaccurate.
Hugging Face, founded in 2016, serves as one of the most popular hubs where developers share and download open-source AI models. Acquiring it gives Nvidia a strong foothold in open-source AI at a moment when open-source developers are working hard to catch up to closed systems from Anthropic and OpenAI. The move largely comes down to protecting Nvidia's dominance in AI chips, which appears increasingly at risk as major closed-source labs like OpenAI, Google, Amazon, and Anthropic build their own chips to reduce reliance on Nvidia. A thriving open-source ecosystem keeps more of the market dependent on Nvidia hardware.
The acquisition does not come as a complete surprise. Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue spends much of this year publicly aligned with Nvidia's open-source push amid debates in Washington over potential restrictions on open-weight models. Those discussions intensify as Chinese labs like Moonshot AI release systems such as Kimi K3 that match leading U.S. models on benchmarks at lower cost, raising competitive and national-security concerns among officials and critics.