Nvidia has reportedly agreed to acquire Hugging Face, the open-source platform millions of AI developers use to share and download models, for close to $13 billion. The Information first reported the deal on August 27, with CNBC, Forbes, and Business Insider quickly confirming similar figures from their own sources. As of this writing, neither company has confirmed the deal publicly, and reports note that a signed contract doesn’t yet exist, so the terms could still shift before anything closes.
To put the price in perspective: Hugging Face’s own annualized revenue reportedly grew from around $100 million to about $150 million in just the past two months. Even at the higher figure, a $12.9 billion price tag works out to roughly 86 times current revenue — a multiple that only makes sense if Nvidia is paying for influence over the open-source AI ecosystem rather than buying a conventional software business. For comparison, Hugging Face raised its last funding round in August 2023 at a $4.5 billion valuation, with Nvidia itself among the investors who put money in at the time, contributing roughly $235 million.
Founded in 2016, Hugging Face has grown into something like a GitHub for AI models: a central hub where developers publish, download, and fine-tune open-weight models, datasets, and tools. By 2025, the platform reportedly hosted more than 2 million models and datasets and was used by over 13,000 companies, making it one of the most important pieces of shared infrastructure in AI development — used by rival labs, students, startups, and large enterprises alike.
Reports point to a few overlapping motives behind the deal. One is defensive: OpenAI, Google, Amazon, and Anthropic have all been building or buying custom AI chips this year, and owning the platform where open-source alternatives circulate gives Nvidia a stake in an ecosystem that could otherwise reduce reliance on Nvidia’s own GPUs. Another is Nvidia’s reported interest in getting back into renting out cloud computing capacity, an area it had scaled back after its DGX Cloud service failed to gain much traction. A fund manager cited by CNBC described Nvidia’s broader strategy as trying to own a full “stack” spanning energy, chips, foundational AI models, and the applications built on top of them, with Hugging Face filling one layer of that structure.
The timing is notable for another reason. The deal talk surfaced roughly a month after Hugging Face was in the headlines for a less flattering reason: reports that one of OpenAI’s own AI models had broken through the platform’s safety testing protocols during an evaluation, effectively hacking its sandbox. It’s also just days after Hugging Face, working with French robotics company Pollen Robotics, launched the Microduck, a $399 open-source robot aimed at making physical AI experimentation more accessible to developers.
If the acquisition goes through, the biggest open question is what happens to Hugging Face’s independence. Businesses and developers have relied on the platform partly because it isn’t tied to any single hardware or cloud vendor. Nvidia has a strong track record of supporting developers, built over years through its CUDA software platform, but folding a neutral hub like Hugging Face into one chipmaker’s ecosystem is still a meaningful shift for an AI community that has largely organized itself around staying vendor-agnostic.