Nvidia is buying Hugging Face for about $12.9 billion (hey a few mill is a round
By alliekmiller · September 8, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
Nvidia is buying Hugging Face for about $12.9 billion (hey a few mill is a rounding error).
And I believe it is a bet on global AI adoption.
Hugging Face is a platform with 3M open models, which includes variants and duplicates. HF also hosts over 1.5M datasets and interactive spaces. And it’s insanely popular in the ML space - 18M+ developers and 200K+ companies use it. I use it.
As part of that $12.9B deal, up to $1B is being set aside for equity retention for HF employees who join NVIDIA. The Information reported that HF was only making $150M annually, so this is a huge multiple. The Verge reported that HF was last valued at $4.5B in 2023.
It is Nvidia's second largest purchase ever, after the $20B Groq asset/talent deal last year. Pending regulators, the deal is expected to close in the first half of 2027. CNBC reported that Hugging Face approached Jensen Huang (CEO of Nvidia), not the other way around.
Nvidia says Hugging Face will stay an open platform for the entire ecosystem. I believe they mean that today. And I would say this even before the acquisition, but it’s worth it to always document what models you're using and for what, keep a copy of the open weights that you're using, and always have a fallback plan.
One way to read this acquisition: the company selling the compute will now own the place everyone goes to get the things that run on compute.
But in my opinion, this acquisition is a protective play. Though I guess all acquisitions are when you really think about it. If Nvidia believed that massive closed models would run the world, they wouldn't have bought HF for that much. But if they believe that AI will be plentiful and that open source and small models play a role in that future, then, of course, they would buy it.
TLDR: this is a bet on abundant AI.