Nvidia Reportedly Agrees to Buy Hugging Face for $12.9B

Nvidia has reportedly agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, according to The Information, which cited a person with knowledge of the deal. CNBC also heard from an anonymous source familiar with the situation who confirmed that a possible Nvidia acquisition had been part of ongoing and recent discussions. However, neither company had publicly confirmed the transaction or responded to requests for comment, so the reported agreement remained unofficial at the time of publication.

The negotiations reportedly gained momentum after Hugging Face received acquisition interest from another potential buyer. Business Insider had separately reported that Nvidia was in talks with the startup and that Hugging Face had hired a bank to assess interest from bidders. These accounts suggest that the company was evaluating competing approaches rather than negotiating exclusively with Nvidia from the beginning. The available reports do not identify the rival bidder or disclose the proposed transaction structure, timetable, financing arrangements or regulatory conditions.

Hugging Face operates one of the AI industry’s most widely used platforms for discovering, sharing, testing and collaboratively improving machine-learning models and related tools. It is particularly important to developers and researchers working with open-source or openly available AI. Its platform acts as a central hub where the community can publish model files, datasets and software demonstrations, making advanced AI systems easier to access and integrate into applications.

If completed, the acquisition would give Nvidia ownership of a critical distribution and collaboration layer in the open AI ecosystem. Nvidia is already the dominant supplier of computing hardware used to train and run many modern AI systems. Adding Hugging Face would extend its influence beyond chips and infrastructure into software, model distribution and developer workflows. This would broaden Nvidia’s position across the AI technology stack and place it closer to the researchers, companies and independent developers deciding which models and tools to adopt.

The reported purchase would also fit Nvidia’s push to become a platform company rather than remain primarily a semiconductor vendor. Fund manager Siddy Jobe of Eonopolis Exponential Technologies argued that Hugging Face aligns with Nvidia’s community-oriented strategy and its stated willingness to support both proprietary and open models. He described foundational models as one layer of Nvidia’s broader business architecture and said the company appears determined to integrate vertically across the industry, from energy and computing infrastructure through models and applications.

Nvidia has already pursued major strategic transactions as it expands its role in AI. The report points to a series of deals completed or announced during the previous year, including a $20 billion licensing agreement with AI-chip startup Groq. The acquisition report also arrived immediately after Nvidia released strong earnings that pushed its shares about 4% higher in after-hours trading. Together, the developments underline the financial resources and strategic ambition available to the chipmaker as it seeks opportunities beyond its core hardware business.

The proposed $12.9 billion price highlights the strategic value of developer communities, model repositories and open-source distribution—not just the underlying AI models themselves. Hugging Face’s importance comes partly from the network built around its services: researchers publish work there, developers reuse it, and companies rely on its tools to evaluate or deploy models. Ownership could therefore give Nvidia a stronger position at the point where AI research is converted into practical software. The reports do not explain how Hugging Face’s governance, neutrality or relationships with competing chip and cloud providers would be protected after an acquisition.

The possibility of Nvidia ownership may attract scrutiny from open-source advocates because Hugging Face has become shared infrastructure for a broad ecosystem, including organizations that compete with Nvidia or prefer hardware-independent tools. CEO Clément Delangue is a prominent supporter of open models, and the source material offers no indication that this position would change. Still, bringing such a central platform under a dominant hardware supplier could raise questions about commercial priorities, platform access and the future balance between community interests and Nvidia’s vertical-integration strategy.

Hugging Face has also recently faced a hacking incident that exposed the security challenges surrounding increasingly powerful AI and cybersecurity tools. Delangue attributed the incident to engineering mistakes and said the company used an Nvidia implementation of a Chinese open model while resolving it. He has argued that AI cybersecurity is likely to become a major global market and that open models could hold a leading position in it. That episode links the companies not only through infrastructure and model distribution but also through the emerging use of open AI systems in defensive security work.

For Nvidia, Hugging Face could connect hardware, foundational models, development tools and applications inside a more unified platform. For the wider industry, the deal would represent a major shift in control over open AI infrastructure. Yet the central claims still depend on anonymous sources and media reports, with no formal announcement from either company. Until Nvidia and Hugging Face confirm the agreement and disclose its terms, completion conditions and plans for the platform, the acquisition should be treated as reported rather than finalized.