On September 2, 2026, Nvidia entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Hugging Face, Inc. The transaction includes an approximately $11.9 billion purchase price payable to Hugging Face stockholders and an equity-based retention program of up to approximately $1.0 billion for Hugging Face employees joining Nvidia. The agreement marks a significant jump from Hugging Face's $4.5 billion valuation in 2023, following a $235 million funding round. The transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2027, subject to the satisfaction or waiver of customary closing conditions, including receipt of required regulatory approvals.
More than 18 million developers, researchers and creators use Hugging Face to share more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets and 1 million applications. The platform also counts more than 200,000 enterprise customers. By absorbing the industry's primary model repository, Nvidia has completed a vertical integration that spans from the silicon powering the data center to the marketplace where models are discovered, shared, and deployed. It is Nvidia's second-biggest purchase, after it paid $20 billion for Groq assets at the end of last year. It is also the first time the company has spent serious money on something that is not silicon.
Hugging Face chief executive Clement Delangue said he initiated the approach, telling CNBC that "open-source AI in general was at the turning point, and that it needed more resources, more scale, more visibility," adding that he considered Nvidia "a perfect home" and that discussions moved quickly. Last year, the company had rejected a $500 million offer from Nvidia, according to the Financial Times. As of August, Hugging Face was clocking $150 million in annualized revenue, according to The Information. Nvidia has pledged that its compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face, that the platform will continue to support open-source and open-weight models from every model builder, and that it will support multi-cloud and multi-accelerator development.
The central regulatory concern is whether Nvidia's dominant chip position lets it steer Hugging Face developers toward CUDA-optimized models. AMD and Intel, along with custom-chip efforts at Google, Amazon and OpenAI, have a direct interest in Hugging Face staying neutral and are likely to raise concerns during any antitrust review. The deal requires a mandatory Hart-Scott-Rodino filing plus FTC and DOJ review in the United States, as well as an EU Phase I review that can extend into Phase II and a likely UK review. Nvidia's commitment to platform neutrality is a public statement rather than a binding structural remedy, which is precisely what regulators will probe. Nvidia's own SEC filing flags that many of the world's most popular open-source models originated in China, and that any regulatory restriction limiting support for models derived from any region could have a material impact on Hugging Face's platform and on Nvidia's business.
The real test arrives not at signing but at the regulatory hearing where Nvidia must convince antitrust officials that owning the world's dominant chip factory and the world's dominant model library is a public good rather than a chokepoint.