In a significant update, Nvidia has officially struck a deal to acquire open-source artificial intelligence platform Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, aiming to expand beyond hardware and deeper into the AI ecosystem.
On Thursday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang wrote a blog post, stating, Hugging Face will “remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem.”
The acquisition would help the company to scale at the highest level, solidifying its position, strengthen its infrastructure and expand access to AI for developers and institutions all across the globe.
Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue told CNBC on Thursday that the company approached Huang over the summer about an agreement, “and a few weeks later, here we are.”
Huang further told CNBC’s Becky Quick on “Squawk Box, “We realized that Hugging Face and open source AI in general was at the turning point,” adding that Nvidia appeared to be a “perfect home” for the company.
The acquisition is Nvidia’s second-largest deal, behind its roughly $20 billion purchase of Groq assets in December 2025. Ahead of the major transaction, Nvidia’s largest acquisition was Israeli chipmaker Mellanox, which it bought for nearly $7 billion in 2019.
The agreement comes as the Chip manufacturing giant continues to invest in capital due to soaring demand for AI computing.
While its GPUs have powered much of the generative AI boom, the Hugging Face acquisition signals a broader strategy focused on software, models and AI infrastructure.
Notably, Hugging Face was recently hit by a hacking incident, raising cybersecurity related concerns.
Delangue stated the breach reinforced the significance of open models, while Huang argued “When I say asymmetric capability, there are way more people who are protecting than there are people who are attacking,” he explained. “And so, the benefit of having the community come together with open models, so that they can collaborate all transparently with each other, gives the defenders an asymmetric advantage.”
Hugging Face stock
Currently, there is no publicly available data suggesting Hugging Face stock prices.
