Nvidia to buy Hugging Face for $12.93bn in one of its biggest deals

Nvidia will buy developer platform Hugging Face for $12.93bn. The deal ranks among the chipmaker’s largest, while Nvidia shares edged lower after the announcement.

The agreement includes about $11.9bn for Hugging Face investors. Nvidia will also offer up to $1bn through an equity-based retention programme for employees who join the company.

Hugging Face to remain open

Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang said Hugging Face would remain open to the wider AI ecosystem. He added that Nvidia chips would not be required to build on or deploy through the platform.

Hugging Face lets developers collaborate, test and share tools. It also provides datasets, software libraries and cloud services for building and deploying AI applications.

Platform offers visibility into AI demand

The acquisition could give Nvidia direct access to information about the models and tools developers use. Forrester principal analyst Naveen Chhabra said this would show the company which models, datasets and architectures were gaining traction before they became widely discussed.

Demand for open-weight models has grown as businesses seek lower-cost alternatives for deploying generative AI. The source identifies DeepSeek, Moonshot and Z.ai as important Chinese players in the field.

Customers develop rival chips

Nvidia is expanding its open-model business as demand for its processors could slow. Meta, OpenAI and Microsoft are developing their own AI chips to reduce reliance on Nvidia’s costly and supply-constrained products.

Hugging Face was founded in 2016 by French entrepreneurs Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf. The company is based in New York and is backed by Intel, Advanced Micro Devices and Amazon.