Nvidia is buying the New York startup Hugging Face for around 13 billion US dollars. The chipmaker announced the deal on September 3, 2026, after earlier reports about acquisition talks. With this move, Nvidia is reaching for the heart of the global open-source AI community, raising questions among developers about the future independence of free models and alternative hardware on the platform.
The leading platform for open AI
According to Nvidia, more than 18 million developers, researchers, and creatives use Hugging Face to share more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets, and 1 million applications. Founded a decade ago, the company is the world's leading open-source AI platform, where developers and companies can share, adapt, and try out free language models, datasets, and tools directly in the browser. Nvidia, the world's largest publicly traded company, said the acquisition aims to accelerate the spread of open models. Unlike proprietary models, such as those developed by OpenAI and Anthropic, open-weight models are publicly accessible, letting users download, adapt, and run them on their own hardware.
Of the purchase price, around 11.9 billion US dollars is set to go directly to Hugging Face's existing investors and shareholders, while about 1 billion US dollars is earmarked as an equity retention package for employees.
Pledge: Hugging Face stays hardware-open
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Hugging Face chief Clément Delangue said the acquisition is aimed primarily at massively scaling the platform's infrastructure and expanding global access to open-source AI. Both companies pledged that Hugging Face will continue operating as an open, vendor-neutral platform. They said they would keep supporting alternative hardware accelerators, such as those from AMD or Intel, as well as various cloud providers, and that usage wouldn't be limited to Nvidia infrastructure. Whether these pledges hold up over time, given Nvidia's economic interest in its own hardware, remains to be seen.
Following the acquisition of Groq, this is the second-largest acquisition in Nvidia's history. Closing the transaction is expected in the first half of 2027, pending regulatory approval.