Nvidia has agreed to buy Hugging Face, the popular open-source artificial intelligence platform, for $12.93bn, in one of the chipmaker’s largest-ever acquisitions and a further push up the AI value chain.
The deal hands the world’s most valuable company control of one of the most widely used hubs for sharing AI models, often likened to a “GitHub for AI.”
Hugging Face is home to more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets and 1 million applications, used by over 18 million developers and 200,000 companies, according to the two firms.
Announcing the deal in a blog post, Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang said the acquisition would help scale Hugging Face’s platform and expand access to AI for developers and institutions worldwide.
It’s a strategic move by Nvidia to diversify its business beyond the chips powering the AI boom by owning a platform through which developers discover and distribute open models, bringing it closer to the software workloads that ultimately run on its hardware.
The buy was seen as a positive by the market, with shares rising overnight.
“Investors haven’t exactly been thrilled by the huge amounts of cash being spent by AI hyperscalers, but news of Nvidia’s near $13 billion deal to acquire Hugging Face resulted in its shares rising,” said AJ Bell head of financial analysis Danni Hewson.
“The chipmaker needed to insulate itself from a potential sales slowdown, as some of its biggest customers are developing their own semiconductors. CEO Jensen Huang has made no secret of the fact he doesn’t want the company to be limited to only a few parts of the AI equation.”
Founded in 2016 and last valued at around $4.5bn in a 2023 fundraising in which Nvidia was among the investors, Hugging Face is reported to be generating annualised revenue of about $150m.
The acquisition is expected to be completed in the first half of 2027, subject to regulatory approval.