The US Justice Department is examining Nvidia’s planned $12.93 billion acquisition of Hugging Face, according to sources cited by Reuters. Officials are asking whether ownership of a central platform for distributing AI models could give Nvidia leverage over competing chip, cloud and model providers.
Nvidia expects the purchase to close in the first half of 2027 and says Hugging Face will continue supporting a broad range of hardware and service partners. The inquiry is not a finding that the deal is illegal. It is part of a wider antitrust review of Nvidia’s acquisitions, investments and sales practices that began under the Biden administration and continued under President Trump.
Regulators have also looked at the company’s purchases of SchedMD and Run:ai, its licensing agreement with Groq and allegations that customers could receive more AI chips if they also bought Nvidia networking equipment or Groq processors. Nvidia faces a separate French competition investigation focused partly on dependence on its CUDA software ecosystem.
Hugging Face’s neutrality is the central practical issue. Developers use the hub to distribute models targeting many kinds of accelerators. Regulators will need to assess whether contractual promises and technical governance can preserve that access after the platform is owned by the dominant AI-chip supplier.