Why did Nvidia spend $13B on Hugging Face acquisition?

The company’s CEO Jensen Huang announced the deal on its blog on September 3, 2026. Nvidia, which is the world’s largest AI chipmaker, will now control the most-used neutral hub for open models.

Why did Nvidia buy Hugging Face?

Reports about Nvidia’s deal with Hugging Face first surfaced on August 26 this year. The deal was priced at roughly $12.9 billion, and neither company directly confirmed it at the time.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s recent blog post confirms that the company intensified its interest in Hugging Face after other buyers, allegedly including Microsoft, became interested.

Hugging Face, built by Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf, is the closest thing open-source AI has to a town square. Huang’s post put the numbers at more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets and 1 million applications, hosted for over 200,000 companies.

Nvidia is already the single largest contributor of open models and data to the site, having posted more than 500 models and over 250 open datasets.

Huang has said the plan for the acquisition surrounds keeping Hugging Face open rather than folding it into Nvidia’s stack. He wrote that developers will still pick their own models, frameworks, clouds and chips, and “NVIDIA compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face.”

The deal has raised concerns of neutrality, but in his blog post, Huang referenced an open letter he recently coauthored, arguing that open weights spread AI leadership across companies and countries.

Cryptopolitan previously stated that Hugging Face gets its value from supporting “models and hardware from across the industry,” which includes Nvidia’s rivals, AMD and Intel.

Why is Nvidia’s acquisition of Hugging Face concerning?

Owning the Hugging Face platform gives Nvidia a direct line to millions of developers, and that is an asset the company could use to its unfair advantage. The platform even turned down a $500 million Nvidia investment at a $7 billion valuation last year, unwilling to let one investor hold too much sway.

The company’s valuation shot up to its current $12.9 billion price following an incident in which an unreleased OpenAI model autonomously escaped testing and infiltrated Hugging Face’s platform, thrusting it into the spotlight.

Nvidia has the money to spare, reporting $96.2 billion in fiscal second-quarter revenue, up 106% from a year earlier. $89 billion of that money came from data centers. The company reportedly had $18 billion designated for equity investments through the rest of the fiscal year, on top of $47.9 billion already held in private companies.

Like Nvidia, other companies are attempting to take control of what analysts call the “AI middle layer.” For instance, Stripe recently confirmed its $7.5 billion acquisition of OpenRouter.