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Nvidia announced Thursday that it will buy AI developer platform Hugging Face in a deal valued at approximately $12.9 billion.

The chipmaker is betting that growing demand for the open-source AI models hosted on Hugging Face will fuel future growth, even as some of Nvidia’s largest customers develop their own chips to reduce their dependence on the company.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said Hugging Face will remain an open-source platform. He estimated that it hosts more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets and 1 million applications.

“Open models let startups, businesses, universities and public institutions build on advanced capabilities without training every model from scratch. They enable organizations to match the right model to the right job,” Huang wrote in a Thursday morning blog post announcing the acquisition.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said Hugging Face will remain an open-source platform. (Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images)

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“That is how AI can advance safely, strengthen cybersecurity and sovereignty, accelerate innovation, and reach factories, hospitals, farms, classrooms and Main Street businesses around the world,” Huang added.

Under the deal, Nvidia will pay Hugging Face shareholders approximately $11.9 billion, while setting aside up to $1 billion in equity-based retention awards for Hugging Face employees who join the company, according to Nvidia’s latest Form 8-K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Nvidia and Hugging Face have collaborated since 2023 to give developers access to Nvidia’s AI computing platform. 

Bringing Hugging Face in-house could help Nvidia offset any future slowdown in demand for its chips as Meta, OpenAI and Microsoft – among its largest customers – invest in their own AI computing capabilities.

Under the deal, Nvidia will pay Hugging Face shareholders approximately $11.9 billion. (Photographer: Loren Elliott/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

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The transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2027, according to the filing.

Also included in the filing was a risk disclosure cautioning that government restrictions on AI models originating in China could materially harm Hugging Face’s business.

Hugging Face hosts numerous AI models developed by Chinese companies, including DeepSeek and Moonshot AI, alongside models from developers around the world.

The transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2027. (Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

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Hugging Face recently made headlines after one of OpenAI’s AI models escaped what was intended to be a secure testing environment and hacked into the platform during an experiment.

The New York-based startup, backed by investors including Intel, Advanced Micro Devices and Amazon, was founded in 2016 by French entrepreneurs Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf.

The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (Desnz) said gas prices are determined on international markets, dismissing criticism of the UK’s own low levels of storage.

The boss of British Gas owner Centrica, Chris O’Shea, has repeatedly called for support from the government to expand its Rough storage facility in the North Sea, warning it has been unviable to fill it up and that it will close next year without a deal.

“We have almost no gas in storage in the UK for the coming winter and this is a huge concern as energy security is national security,” he said on LinkedIn, external last week.

A Desnz spokesman said: “We remain open to discussing proposals on all gas storage sites, as long as it provides value for money for taxpayers.”

The department also pointed to Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s pledge to cut VAT from energy bills from October, as well as government action to reduce Britain’s reliance on natural gas altogether.

Ángel Talavera, chief European economist at Oxford Economics, said there is a “glass half full, and a glass half empty” picture unfolding.

On one hand, wholesale gas prices are significantly lower than during the crisis which followed Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

On the other, households and businesses will still face significantly higher energy bills than usual over the coming months.

“It’s serious, but not catastrophic,” he told the BBC, adding “something would have to dramatically change to lower prices”.

He pointed to a reduction in demand for natural gas in general as a result of the shift towards renewables, but said the overall picture depends hugely on the winter weather.

“If you have a warmer winter than average, that will be great for demand,” he said. But he warned a colder than average winter would have the opposite effect, driving up demand for energy and pushing up prices.

It is not known how the developing El Niño over the Pacific Ocean will impact Britain’s winter. The so-called Big Freeze of winter 2009-10 was, at the time, the coldest in three decades – and this coincided with an El Niño.

However, 2006-07 was also an El Niño winter and that was unseasonably warm.

Talavera said gas prices could come down if the weather helps reduce demand and the Strait of Hormuz reopens sooner than expected.

But, at the moment, “the weather machine remains our main hope”.

It comes as a recent spike in the UK government’s borrowing costs eased. After a sharp uptick on Tuesday, which took the yield on a 10-year bond – or gilt – to the highest level since 2008, it fell back slightly on Thursday.

Yields are hovering around 5.15%, however, which would still represent a post-2008 peak were it not for Tuesday’s jump.

Users of Grok, the artificial intelligence chatbot developed by Elon Musk’s xAI, began reporting access problems Thursday morning, with outage-tracking site Downdetector logging a spike in complaints starting around 9:29 a.m. EDT.

The outage tracker’s official account flagged the surge in a social media post shortly after the reports began, asking affected users how the disruption was impacting them and directing people to its live outage dashboard for further updates. The hashtag “GrokDown” began circulating on social media as users compared notes on the issue.

Independent monitoring services tracking Grok’s availability separately picked up signs of trouble around the same window. One status-tracking platform, StatusGator, reported detecting an outage affecting Grok’s web service that had not yet been officially acknowledged by xAI, noting that its own server checks indicated the service was down even before any formal status update had been posted. The same tracker said it had logged 66 user-submitted outage reports within the preceding 24-hour period, reflecting a broader pattern of intermittent trouble with the service heading into Thursday’s spike in complaints.

As of the time reports began surfacing, xAI’s own official status page for Grok’s web service had not indicated any acknowledged issue, continuing to display a message stating the company was “not aware of any issues impacting Grok (Web).” Xai has not issued a public statement specifically addressing the cause of Thursday’s disruption.

Grok’s status page shows a documented history of periodic outages dating back to late last year, with the service experiencing a number of brief “Temporarily Unavailable” incidents throughout 2026 alone. According to the status page’s incident log, Grok experienced an outage lasting roughly two hours and 24 minutes in March, along with shorter disruptions of 40 minutes and 51 minutes in earlier incidents the same month and in February, respectively. A more significant incident in late January combined a “Temporarily Unavailable” outage with a separate period of increased error rates and latency, both lasting roughly seven and a half hours, marking one of the longer disruptions to affect the service so far this year.

Analysts and third-party monitoring services that track Grok’s reliability have noted that the chatbot, as a relatively young AI product compared with more established competitors, has experienced a somewhat bumpy availability history as xAI has continued scaling its infrastructure and rolling out new model versions. Notable stretches of instability have coincided in the past with major product launches, including traffic spikes following the release of Grok-2 in late 2024 and planned maintenance windows tied to the rollout of Grok-3 in 2025, both of which contributed to periods of reduced availability for users during those transitions.

More recently, monitoring services have generally characterized Grok’s infrastructure as having stabilized compared with its earlier history, with downtime incidents becoming both shorter and less frequent as xAI’s systems have matured. Even so, industry trackers have noted that xAI’s public communication around outages has historically been less detailed than that of some competing AI developers, such as OpenAI or Anthropic, making it more difficult for users to get timely, specific information directly from the company when disruptions occur.

Grok is integrated directly into X, the social media platform also owned by Musk, in addition to being available through its own standalone website and mobile application. That integration means disruptions affecting Grok’s backend systems can potentially impact not only users accessing the chatbot directly, but also those interacting with Grok-powered features embedded elsewhere across Musk’s broader platform ecosystem, including automated responses and content-analysis tools built into X itself.

Thursday’s reported outage is not the first time Grok has drawn public attention for reasons beyond routine technical disruptions this year. In one earlier high-profile incident, Grok’s own account on X was briefly suspended from the platform, an episode that drew scrutiny after the chatbot itself suggested, in posts that were later deleted, that the suspension may have been connected to comments it had made regarding the Israel-Gaza conflict. Neither X nor xAI provided an official explanation for that particular suspension at the time.

Downdetector and similar crowdsourced outage-tracking platforms compile real-time user reports and compare the volume of incoming complaints against typical baseline activity levels to determine whether a genuine, widespread service disruption is likely underway. A sudden, sharp increase in reports across a large number of users, as occurred Thursday morning, is generally treated as strong evidence of a broader platform-level issue rather than isolated technical problems affecting individual users’ devices, accounts or internet connections.

For developers and businesses that rely on Grok through xAI’s application programming interface, rather than through the consumer-facing chatbot directly, disruptions of this kind can carry additional consequences, potentially affecting any third-party products or services built on top of Grok’s underlying AI models. Industry data on AI API reliability suggests such outages are a common challenge across the broader AI industry, with disruptions affecting a majority of development teams that depend on external AI services at some point, and typical resolution times for AI service outages running under an hour on average, according to figures compiled by API monitoring firms.

As of Thursday late morning, it remained unclear how long the reported access issues affecting Grok would persist, or what specifically had caused the spike in user complaints. Affected users were advised to check both Downdetector’s live outage map and xAI’s official status page for updates, while independent monitoring services continued tracking the situation in the absence of a formal acknowledgment or detailed explanation from xAI regarding the disruption’s underlying cause.

The company that runs the stadium says it is ‘absolutely committed’ to paying the national minimum wage and national living wage

Bosses at Ashton Gate stadium have apologised for “an error” which they say led to them being named on a list of companies that failed to pay staff the minimum wage.

On Thursday, the government published a list of more than 600 UK firms that had “underpaid workers”. Ashton Gate Limited (the company behind the stadium) was among the businesses named.

According to the government, Ashton Gate Limited failed to pay £5,895.05 to 142 workers.

But a spokesperson for Ashton Gate said the underpayment was due to “an error” that occurred in the 2021-22 financial years when some events and security staff purchased their own uniform rather than being supplied by the stadium, and a number of employees were not paid for training days.

“We are absolutely committed to paying the national minimum wage and national living wage to our staff, the vast majority of whom are from within our community,” a spokesperson said.

“We regret that this led to a small number of payments falling below the minimum wage requirement, for which we apologise. The error was rectified at the time and the affected staff were reimbursed immediately.

“In relation to uniform and training, Ashton Gate is fully compliant with HMRC guidance and we continually strive to be a great local employer offering significant career opportunities to our community.”

The government said around £4m had been returned to more than 27,000 UK workers who had been denied the pay they were legally owed, with penalties totalling £7m issued to the employers responsible.

Business secretary Jonathan Reynolds said: “The best businesses know that looking after your workers isn’t just the right thing to do, it’s the smart thing to do, building the stronger, more successful businesses that drive growth in every postcode.

“Most employers already understand this, and I want to work with them to ensure they have every piece of guidance and support available to help them follow the rules. Short-changing your staff isn’t a shortcut to success and we are determined to stamp it out.”

Other firms named on the list include DIY giant B&Q, which the government said failed to pay £456,934 to 4,530 workers.

“The shortfalls in payments were unintentional,” a B&Q spokesperson said. “They relate to calculations involving geographical allowances which are paid in addition to minimum hourly rates. All affected colleagues were quickly paid in full in July 2025.”

Fast food chain Five Guys was also reported to have owed £54,000 to 3,699 staff.

It said that “technical differences in how payroll regulations were applied” led to its underpayments, which were identified by HMRC.

“We worked closely and transparently with HMRC throughout the process and have made all required payments to affected current and former employees,” a spokesperson for Five Guys added.

Future of work minister Kate Dearden added: “Underpaying your staff is illegal, and we will not let workers foot the bill for their boss failing to follow the rules.

“We’re making sure workers get the hard-earned pay they deserve, and where employers fall short, they will be held to account. Every employer should check their payroll now and reach out to Acas if they need further support.”

The board of directors is a not-for-profit organisation and although some staff are employed, the majority are volunteers.

Its statement added that the festival “weathered the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression and re-emerged after Covid, but now “stands at a cross roads”.

During the pandemic, the festival transitioned to an online format and said it needed to raise £40,000 by December 2020 or would be forced to close.

In 2024, the event was rebranded the Ludlow Marches Food and Drink Festival.

“These festivals are about much more than a weekend event,” the organisers said.

“They support local producers, attract visitors to the town, generate significant economic benefits for businesses across the region, and help maintain Ludlow’s reputation as one of Britain’s great food destinations

“If Ludlow Food Festival means something to you, this year is the year to support it.”

Several new features have been added in hopes of attracting more visitors.

These includes a food theatre, cookery school, food workshops for children, and a soundtrack stage.

This article was written by

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