Nvidia’s Hugging Face Deal Puts Open AI’s Main Hub in Play

Nvidia plans to acquire Hugging Face for about $12.9 billion, according to The Decoder. The reported structure includes roughly $11.9 billion in purchase price and up to $1 billion in a stock program intended to retain staff.

CEO Jensen Huang announced the deal on September 3, 2026, after reports surfaced in late August. The transaction still needs regulatory approval and is not expected to close until the first half of 2027.

Hugging Face is described as the go-to hub for open AI models, with more than 18 million developers and 200,000 companies using the platform. Nvidia says users share more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets, and 1 million applications there.

That reach makes Hugging Face more than a software asset. It is a major distribution point for developers, companies, universities, governments, and cloud users working with open models.

Huang says Hugging Face will remain open to everyone, with no requirement to use Nvidia hardware. The company also says other clouds and chips will continue to be supported.

At the same time, the acquisition would give Nvidia influence over a platform central to open model discovery, deployment, and hosting. The practical takeaway: even if the platform stays hardware-neutral, Nvidia would sit closer to where open AI demand turns into compute demand.

The Decoder frames the deal against a broader shift: large closed AI providers are increasingly designing their own accelerators, while open models run across many clouds, companies, universities, and government agencies. That makes open AI users a potentially valuable customer base for Nvidia’s compute infrastructure.

Hugging Face also rents out compute time to run models, giving the platform a role in both distribution and hosting. For Nvidia, that could complement partner-based compute channels such as its Lepton marketplace and relationships with AI cloud partners.