Nvidia has announced its agreement to acquire Hugging Face for approximately $13 billion. The acquisition, confirmed on Thursday, follows weeks of speculation. This move indicates Nvidia's commitment to enhancing its software capabilities in generative AI alongside its existing infrastructure. Nvidia currently provides a range of free, customizable open-weight AI models, known as Nemotron, and has pledged to uphold Hugging Face's open standards, aiming to support developers in accessing advanced, nonproprietary tools.
The acquisition also reflects Nvidia's belief that open-weight models are more beneficial for the tech industry compared to closed, proprietary models developed by companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. Earlier this month, Nvidia gathered over 80 companies to sign an open letter urging the US government to support open-weight AI models. Additionally, Nvidia introduced an initiative called SAFE (Shared AI Findings Exchange) to promote the confidential collection and analysis of AI incidents, aiming to improve safety and reduce systemic risks.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang stated in the press release, "Open models let startups, businesses, universities and public institutions build on advanced capabilities without training every model from scratch. AI advances faster when people can build together."
Despite Nvidia's proprietary CUDA software layer, the company is shifting towards a broader role in the AI landscape, producing not only GPUs but also high-performance CPUs and expanding its software offerings to retain developer engagement.
Hugging Face, founded in New York City a decade ago by three French entrepreneurs, initially aimed to create an AI companion app. While that concept did not succeed, the team pivoted to making natural language processing tools more accessible to developers, ultimately evolving into a platform for sharing source code, data sets, and large language models in the generative AI space.
Hugging Face cofounder and CEO Clément Delangue remarked on X about the acquisition, stating, "Open-source AI is at an inflection point. 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."
As of December 2025, Hugging Face had raised nearly $400 million in venture capital, with notable investors including Betaworks, Lux Capital, Sequoia Ventures, Coatue, Addition, and individuals like Greg Brockman, Richard Socher, and NBA player Kevin Durant. Recently, Hugging Face gained attention after its platform was reportedly hacked by AI agents from OpenAI, raising concerns about the safety and security of autonomous agents in the tech industry.
In a 2023 interview with CNBC, Delangue predicted a significant increase in the number of developers working with AI models, estimating that within five years, there could be around 100 million AI builders, positioning Hugging Face favorably if they utilize its platform extensively.