Nvidia Buys Hugging Face for $13 Billion Amid Concerns Over Platform Access
Nvidia's latest acquisition is a massive one, $12.93 billion for Hugging Face, a platform used by millions of developers and companies to download, share, and run AI models locally. The deal adds to Nvidia's already substantial presence in the AI ecosystem, where it supplies the chips that most systems run on and contributes to open-source projects like Hugging Face itself.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang emphasized that users will still have a choice of models, frameworks, clouds, and computing platforms after the acquisition. However, critics point out that Nvidia's commercial interests may conflict with keeping competitor tools easily accessible on the platform.
Hugging Face has over 3 million models, 500,000 datasets, and 1 million applications, used by 18 million individual developers and more than 200,000 companies. The acquisition is expected to close in the first half of 2027, and regulatory review is underway in the European Union and the United States.