NVIDIA is making another major move to strengthen its position at the center of the artificial intelligence industry. The AI chip giant has reportedly agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, according to reports citing people familiar with the deal.
Hugging Face has become one of the world’s most important platforms for artificial intelligence developers, providing a massive ecosystem for sharing and accessing open-source AI models, datasets and development tools.
The reported acquisition would take NVIDIA far beyond its traditional dominance in GPUs and AI hardware. By controlling Hugging Face, NVIDIA could gain a much stronger position in the software, model distribution and cloud-computing layers of the AI industry.
The price also represents a huge increase in Hugging Face’s valuation. The company was valued at approximately $4.5 billion in a 2023 funding round, which included NVIDIA among its investors. The reported $12.9 billion acquisition price would therefore value the company at nearly three times that previous level.
For NVIDIA, the strategic value could be even greater than the price suggests. Major AI companies are increasingly developing their own chips in an effort to reduce dependence on NVIDIA hardware. A closer connection with the global open-source AI developer community could help NVIDIA keep its GPUs and computing infrastructure deeply embedded in the next generation of AI applications.
However, the transaction should still be treated as a reported agreement rather than a completed acquisition. As of August 27, neither NVIDIA nor Hugging Face had publicly announced the transaction, and reports indicated that the deal had not yet closed.
If completed, the $12.9 billion purchase would rank among NVIDIA’s biggest acquisitions and could reshape the competitive landscape of open-source AI, bringing one of the industry’s most influential developer communities under the control of the world’s dominant AI chipmaker.
