Nvidia has agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $13 billion, gaining control of one of the AI industry’s most widely used repositories for models and datasets. The price nearly doubles the $7 billion valuation at which Hugging Face reportedly rejected a large Nvidia investment last year to preserve its independence.
Hugging Face hosts millions of downloadable models and datasets and has become important infrastructure for open-weight AI, where developers can inspect, adapt, and run model weights on their own systems. Nvidia says the platform will remain open after the deal and continue supporting hardware from multiple vendors. The stated goal is to accelerate adoption of open models rather than turn the hub into an Nvidia-only service.
The transaction is Nvidia’s largest acquisition, far exceeding its $6.9 billion purchase of Mellanox in 2020. It also extends the chipmaker’s influence beyond processors and networking into the software distribution layer developers use to find and deploy AI. Nvidia has already committed large sums to startup investments and financing arrangements that expand demand for AI infrastructure.
The promise of platform neutrality will be closely watched because Hugging Face sits between model creators, cloud providers, and competing chip companies. The agreement still faces the usual closing process, and public commitments about openness will matter most in how product access, rankings, integrations, and governance work after Nvidia takes control.