NVIDIA Corp. (NASDAQ:NVDA) said Thursday it agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, bringing one of the world’s largest open artificial intelligence developer platforms under the AI chip giant.
The deal would combine the company’s computing infrastructure and engineering resources with a platform used by more than 18 million developers, researchers and creators. Hugging Face hosts more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets and 1 million applications. More than 200,000 companies use the platform.
Hugging Face To Remain Open
The company said Hugging Face will remain open to the broader AI ecosystem after the acquisition. Developers will continue to choose their preferred models, frameworks, cloud providers and computing platforms.
Importantly, NVIDIA hardware will not be required to build or deploy through Hugging Face. The platform will also continue supporting open-source and open-weight models, as well as multi-cloud and multi-accelerator deployments.
The company already has a significant presence on Hugging Face. It said it is the platform’s largest contributor of open models and data. NVIDIA has released more than 500 models and over 250 open datasets on the platform.
The acquisition could give Hugging Face access to the company’s infrastructure, engineering capabilities and global reach. NVIDIA said those resources could improve platform reliability, safety, model evaluation, inference and deployment while preserving Hugging Face’s open ecosystem.
NVIDIA held $22.44 billion in cash and cash equivalents and $34.14 billion in marketable debt securities as of July 26.
Acquisition Unlocks Strategic Value
The deal could also deepen NVIDIA’s reach across the AI ecosystem. Counterpoint Research analyst Neil Shah said ownership of Hugging Face could give the company earlier insight into emerging models, architectures and AI frameworks.
That visibility could help the company optimize its software and systems while potentially driving more AI workloads toward NVIDIA hardware and infrastructure.
However, Shah said Hugging Face’s neutrality remains critical. The platform hosts models from AI developers and NVIDIA competitors. As a result, its value could suffer if developers view it as too closely tied to NVIDIA or its CUDA ecosystem.
NVIDIA Price Action
NVDA Price Action: NVIDIA shares were up 1.27% at $227.25 at the time of publication on Thursday, according to Benzinga Pro data.
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