Quick Facts
- Nvidia agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, including $11.9 billion to shareholders and $1 billion in equity to retain employees.
- Hugging Face generates $150 million in annualized revenue, putting the deal at roughly 86 times sales.
- The acquisition is Nvidia’s second largest on record, behind its $20 billion purchase of Groq assets in December 2025.
Nvidia confirmed on Sept. 2, 2026, that it has agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12,930,300,000, according to an SEC 8-K filing. The deal includes $11.9 billion paid to Hugging Face shareholders and an additional $1 billion in equity to retain employees who join Nvidia. The acquisition is expected to close in the first half of 2027.
Hugging Face hosts more than three million models, 500,000 datasets, and one million AI applications. The platform counts more than 18 million users and over 200,000 companies that rely on it to discover, evaluate, and customize AI. The company clocks $150 million in annualized revenue, meaning Nvidia is paying approximately 86 times sales.
The price represents a sharp premium over Hugging Face’s last known valuation. In 2023, the company raised $235 million led by Salesforce Ventures, with participation from Google, Amazon, IBM, and Nvidia, at a $4.5 billion valuation. The $12.9 billion acquisition price is nearly three times that figure.
Hugging Face was founded in 2016 and has raised over $395 million in total funding before this deal.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang addressed the strategic rationale directly. “This is such a large growth driver of our company, and together we can scale the open community even faster than they’re able to do today,” Huang told CNBC. He added in a blog post that Hugging Face will “remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem.”
Hugging Face CEO Clement Delangue described how the deal came together. “During the summer I think we realized that Hugging Face and open source AI in general was at a turning point and that it needed more resources, more scale, more visibility,” Delangue said. “So, we went to see Jensen, and we told him, we want to make open source AI big. And he told us, let’s do it.”
Delangue said Hugging Face will continue operating as an independent, neutral platform within Nvidia. He set a target of expanding the Hugging Face community to 100 million AI builders.
Nvidia is already the largest contributor of open models and data to Hugging Face, having published more than 500 models and over 250 datasets on the platform. The company reported $96.2 billion in quarterly revenue in its most recent earnings report, with data-center revenue reaching $89 billion. Nvidia also said it has put more than $50 billion into AI frontier labs.
Justin Boitano, Nvidia VP and GM of Enterprise Computing, said the company expects regulators to view the deal favorably. “NVIDIA’s role in this is helping them scale and expand access to AI globally. And so we think regulators are going to see this as overwhelmingly positive because it’s going to infuse AI into every country, into every industry,” Boitano said.
The deal ranks as Nvidia’s second largest acquisition on record. Its biggest was the $20 billion purchase of assets from chipmaker Groq in December 2025. Before that, the largest was the $6.9 billion purchase of Israeli chipmaker Mellanox in 2019.
For enterprise software buyers and SaaS founders, the acquisition signals that open-source AI infrastructure is now valued at a premium that rivals proprietary platforms. Control of the dominant model-sharing hub gives Nvidia a position across the full AI development stack, from chips to datasets to deployment.
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