Nvidia Confirms $12.93B Acquisition of Hugging Face Open Model Hub

Nvidia confirmed a definitive agreement to acquire Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, disclosed publicly on September 3, 2026 after the companies signed on September 2. TechCrunch and Nvidia’s SEC 8-K describe Hugging Face as hosting about three million models, one million applications used by more than 18 million developers, and half a million datasets. The deal is expected to close in the first half of 2027, subject to regulatory approvals.

Nvidia’s filing splits consideration into roughly $11.9 billion payable to Hugging Face stockholders (subject to adjustments) and an equity retention program of up to about $1.0 billion for employees joining Nvidia. In a company blog post quoted by TechCrunch, CEO Jensen Huang said Hugging Face will remain “an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem,” that developers will keep choosing their own models, frameworks, clouds, and compute, and that “Nvidia compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face.”

Why Delangue went to Nvidia

Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue told TechCrunch he approached Huang because open-source AI needed more compute, support, collaboration, and visibility to scale as an alternative to closed APIs. TechCrunch notes Hugging Face raised more than $395 million to date, including a 2023 round led by Salesforce Ventures with Google, Amazon, IBM, and Nvidia among investors, and cites The Information’s report that the company was at about $150 million in annualized revenue last month. Delangue also told TechCrunch in July that growth was helping the platform get “close to profitability.”

Huang has been a public advocate for open weights, including an open letter co-signed by multiple organizations. TechCrunch notes Nvidia has published more than 500 models and 250 open datasets on the Hub, and reported a recent Wall Street Journal account of a roughly $6 billion open-model arrangement with coding startup Poolside.

Antitrust and the openness pledge

Because this is a conventional acquisition rather than a license-and-talent structure, the transaction triggers standard merger review. Secondary analysis from BizTechDaily and MLex frames Nvidia’s openness and multi-accelerator commitments as the likely center of US and EU scrutiny: whether owning the primary open-model distribution surface could reinforce Nvidia’s position across the AI stack. Through close, Hugging Face continues under current governance; nothing changes for developers’ day-to-day Hub access today.

The acquisition lands days after OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra launch cycle and amid heightened debate over open-weight infrastructure. Primary references for this brief are TechCrunch’s September 3 report, Nvidia’s September 2 Form 8-K (purchase price and retention terms), and Nvidia’s public openness commitments as quoted in those materials.