Nvidia has agreed to acquire Hugging Face, which makes online developer tools and maintains a massive library of open-source data sets, for nearly $13 billion. While the deal had been rumored for weeks, the companies made it official Thursday morning.
The deal signals Nvidia’s seriousness about being steeped in the software side of generative AI development as well as in infrastructure. Nvidia already offers customers a suite of free, customizable open-weights AI models, known as Nemotron. As part of its announcement, Nvidia committed to maintaining Hugging Face’s current open standards, suggesting that the chipmaker is positioning itself as an even greater resource for developers looking to access cutting-edge, nonproprietary tools.
The move also underscores Nvidia’s position that open-weights models are better for the tech industry than closed, proprietary AI models like those developed by OpenAI and Anthropic. Earlier this month, Nvidia rallied more than 80 companies to sign an open letter asking the US government to defend open-weight AI models. Nvidia also launched an initiative called SAFE, or Shared AI Findings Exchange, that encouraged tech companies to “confidentially collect and analyze AI incidents and near misses, identify recurring control failures and publish evidence-based operating recommendations that reduce systemic risk.”
“Open models let startups, businesses, universities and public institutions build on advanced capabilities without training every model from scratch,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in the press release announcing the deal. “AI advances faster when people can build together.”
Nvidia’s embrace of open-source software and open-weights AI might seem like an abrupt turn, especially given that CUDA, the software layer for its highly coveted GPUs, is itself proprietary. But as frontier AI labs and some of the large hyperscalers, including Amazon and Meta, seek to build their own custom chips, Nvidia has begun to position itself as a maker of not just GPUs but also high-performance CPUs, and has widened its software offerings in order to keep developers building on Nvidia’s platforms.
Business Insider previously reported that the two companies were in talks, and The Information later reported that a deal had been reached.
Hugging Face was founded a decade ago by three French entrepreneurs in New York City, who wanted to launch an AI “companion” app. That didn’t catch on, but the team’s efforts to build their own natural language processing (NLP) tools inspired their next move: making complex tech tools more accessible to developers. Hugging Face eventually became a platform for developers to freely share source code, data sets, and, in the generative AI era, large language models.
“Open-source AI is at an inflection point,” wrote Hugging Face cofounder and CEO Clément Delangue in a post on X announcing the acquisition. “Thanks to the community, we’ve shown that it can be a complement, and even an alternative, to closed-source APIs. But for it to happen at larger scale, it needs more compute, more support, more collaboration and more visibility.”
According to PitchBook data, Hugging Face had raised nearly $400 million in venture capital funding as of December 2025. Some of its backers include Betaworks, Lux Capital, Sequoia Ventures, Coatue, and Addition. Notable individual investors include Greg Brockman, Richard Socher, and the NBA player Kevin Durant.
Hugging Face has more recently been front and center after its platform was hacked by AI agents from OpenAI. The incident sparked a broader conversation across the tech industry about the safety, security, and manageability of the autonomous agents being touted by top AI companies.
In a 2023 interview with CNBC Delangue predicted that the number of developers working with AI models would soar, and estimated that within five years, “you’re going to have like 100 million AI builders. And if all of them use Hugging Face all day, every day, we’ll obviously be in a good position.”
Obviously, Nvidia seems to agree.
