Nvidia has agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, the chipmaker confirmed Thursday in a CEO blog post and in coverage from TechCrunch, The Verge, and Reuters. An SEC filing says the companies entered a definitive agreement on September 2. The talks brief on AI Tech Daily is done. This is the signed deal.
The structure, per that filing and Reuters, is about $11.9 billion payable to Hugging Face stockholders, plus an equity-based retention program of up to about $1 billion for employees who join Nvidia. The transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2027, subject to customary conditions and regulatory approvals. Signed is not closed.
CEO Jensen Huang said Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem, and that Nvidia compute will not be required to build on or deploy through it. TechCrunch quoted Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue saying the company needed more compute, support, collaboration, and visibility, and that Huang offered that path. Huang also said Nvidia has released more than 500 models and more than 250 open datasets on the platform.
Hugging Face hosts millions of models, datasets, and apps used by tens of millions of developers. The Verge noted its last official valuation was $4.5 billion in 2023, and that The Information has put recent annualized revenue around $150 million. The Financial Times previously reported Hugging Face rejected a $500 million Nvidia investment offer last year.
The industry read is strategic, not just financial. Frontier labs are building their own chips. Owning the main open-model hub gives Nvidia a distribution foothold as those customers try to loosen hardware dependence. Regulators still have to clear it.