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Nvidia Agrees to Buy Hugging Face in $12.93 Billion Deal

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Nvidia Agrees to Buy Hugging Face in $12.93 Billion Deal

Nvidia (NVDA) has agreed to acquire artificial intelligence platform Hugging Face in a deal worth up to $12.93 billion as the technology bellwether pledged to foster open-source models in the AI ecosystem.

Nvidia will pay roughly $11.9 billion to Hugging Face's shareholders as part of the deal, which includes an equity-based retention program of up to $1 billion for employees joining the chip giant, it said in an 8-K filing. Hugging Face operates a platform for developing and deploying open-source models, datasets and applications, according to Nvidia.

Nvidia's shares rose 1.1% in Thursday trade, taking its year-to-date gain to 22%.

"Together, we will scale Hugging Face's platform, strengthen its infrastructure and expand access to AI for developers and institutions worldwide," Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang said in a blog post.

Nvidia intends to keep Hugging Face an open platform, with no requirement that Nvidia's compute be used to build or deploy through Hugging Face, Huang said.

"As the opportunity for open models accelerates, Hugging Face can serve the global AI community at unprecedented scale," according to Huang. "Nvidia's infrastructure, engineering and global reach can help improve platform reliability, safety, model evaluation, inference and deployment capabilities, while preserving the open ecosystem that made Hugging Face foundational."

The transaction, which requires regulatory approval, is expected to complete in the first half of next year, Nvidia said in the filing.

Nvidia cautioned that government restrictions on the use of open-source models that originated in China could limit the expected benefits of the acquisition.

"Any regulatory control or other restriction that limits our ability to provide products and services that support models derived from any region, including China, could have a material impact on Hugging Face's platform, as well as a material impact on our business, operating results, and financial condition," the company said in the regulatory filing.

The deal comes as major technology companies step up acquisitions to bolster their capabilities. Alphabet's (GOOG, GOOGL) Google agreed in March 2025 to acquire cloud security platform Wiz for $32 billion and completed the transaction in March this year.

Meta Platforms (META) announced a deal to acquire AI startup Manus in December 2025. However, Chinese regulators ordered the transaction to be unwound, Reuters reported in August.

Earlier this week, Nvidia expanded its partnership with chip designer MediaTek, including a $3.5 billion investment, to support adoption of the company's proprietary interconnect technology for custom rack-scale AI chips.

Last month, the tech bellwether reported fiscal second-quarter results that more than doubled from a year ago and topped Wall Street expectations. In the same month, Nvidia announced an expanded partnership to supply 2 million additional graphics processing units for Amazon.com's (AMZN) Amazon Web Services.

Price: $227.62, Change: $+3.21, Percent Change: +1.43%

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