Nvidia closes in on $12.9 billion Hugging Face acquisition as neutrality concerns mount

Why it matters: Nvidia is reportedly close to buying Hugging Face for a staggering $12.9 billion. If completed, the transaction would put the main supplier of AI processors in control of the platform that has become one of the most important hubs for sharing open AI models and supporting developer collaboration.

The Information reports that Nvidia has agreed to the purchase, citing one person with knowledge of the agreement. A separate Business Insider report is less definitive, saying the companies held serious talks at a valuation above $13 billion but had not signed an agreement. Neither Nvidia nor Hugging Face has publicly confirmed the reports.

If it does close at the stated price, Hugging Face would become Nvidia’s largest completed takeover, surpassing the $7 billion it paid for Mellanox in 2020.

The startup is often described as the GitHub of AI, providing a central hub where developers publish, discover, test, and deploy models and datasets. Hugging Face says its community reached 13 million users, more than two million public models, and over 500,000 public datasets in 2025.

The Information says Hugging Face recently generated about $150 million in annualized revenue, putting the reported price at roughly 86 times that figure. Its previous funding round raised $235 million at a $4.5 billion valuation in 2023, with Nvidia joining Salesforce, Google, Amazon, AMD, Intel, Qualcomm, and IBM as investors.

Nvidia and Hugging Face have a history of collaboration. There was their 2023 partnership that connected Hugging Face models to Nvidia’s DGX Cloud for training and fine-tuning. The pair later expanded into on-demand training clusters. Hugging Face also works with AMD, AWS, and Google, making platform neutrality a concern if the AI industry’s dominant chip supplier becomes its new owner.

– Jensen Huang (@JensenHuang) July 24, 2026

Buying Hugging Face could give Nvidia greater influence over how developers find, share, optimize, and deploy AI models. The move also aligns with Jensen Huang’s public support for open models. Nvidia’s CEO believes wider access encourages AI adoption and ultimately creates more demand for chips and data centers. Nvidia and Hugging Face also signed the same industry letter urging US policymakers to keep advanced model weights accessible. The company can certainly afford the deal, having just reported $96.2 billion in quarterly revenue and $59.7 billion in net income.”

“I think Nvidia is very much a community, a platform-based company, and in that respect, I think Hugging Face fits perfectly within that. There is this five-layer cake from Nvidia, and foundational models are one of them,” Siddy Jobe, a fund manager at Eonopolis Exponential Technologies funds, told CNBC. “It is clear that Nvidia wants to be integrated in the entire stack vertically, going from energy to foundational models and also to applications,” he added.

Hugging Face reportedly rejected a $500 million Nvidia investment late last year at a $7 billion valuation because it didn’t want one dominant backer influencing decisions. One would expect that full ownership will raise that concern again, and regulators may agree.

Similar fears surrounded Nvidia’s proposed Arm purchase, a $40 billion deal that collapsed in 2022 under global antitrust pressure.