NVIDIA Acquires Hugging Face for $12.93 Billion

By Allison Proffitt

September 3, 2026 | This morning NVIDIA announced its agreement to acquire Hugging Face for $12.93 billion. The two groups plan to scale Hugging Face’s platform, strengthen its infrastructure and expand access to AI for developers and institutions worldwide, according to Jensen Huang, NVIDIA’s CEO, in a blog at NVIDIA.

Editor’s Note: This story has been updated with details and quotes from an NVIDIA-Hugging Face press briefing.

In a press briefing this morning, Clement Delangue, co-founder and CEO of Hugging Face, dated the beginning of the acquisition to “a few weeks ago” this summer. “We think we’re at the inflection point for Hugging Face and open source AI in general,” he explained. We think with the resources, support, [and] the long-term approach of NVIDIA, we’ll be able to do basically what we’ve been doing for the past 10 years—meaning, supporting the open source AI community—but to the next level at a much bigger scale.” Delangue, in a post about the acquisition on X said, “The founders and the team are all staying to keep pushing this mission forward.”

Reportedly more than 18 million developers, researchers, and creators use Hugging Face to share more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets, and 1 million applications. More than 200,000 companies use the platform to discover, evaluate, customize, and deploy AI. NVIDIA itself is the largest contributor of open models and data to Hugging Face, having released more than 500 models on Hugging Face and more than 250 open datasets.

Delangue did not outline many specific goals for the “scaling” that the NIVIDA acquisition will enable, but he did say that Hugging Face plans to grow their global AI developer community from 18 million users to 100 million users “in the next few years.”

In his blog post, Huang pledged that Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem. Justin Boitano, vice president and general manager of enterprise computing at NVIDIA, on the same briefing call with Delangue, reiterated that promise.

“We believe having a healthy ecosystem of both closed model providers and open models is going to lead to a world where you’re going to continue to train these models and run these models at scale,” Boitano said. “Open models really create the ability for every model to build their own domain-specific intelligence [and] own the competitive advantage of their business. So more and more of the world will build on open to be able to ensure data privacy and security and growth.”

Hugging Face will continue to support open source and open weight models from across the ecosystem, from every model builder. It will continue to support multi-cloud and multi-accelerator development and deployment, so builders can use the hardware and infrastructure that best fit their work.

“The Hugging Face team has built an amazing community,” said Boitano. “The only way you do that is by building the trust of the developer community and giving developers access to run the models and access the data sets from any platform in the world that they want to run it on. We are incentivized, obviously, and motivated to keep this open and neutral and ensure that developers can work wherever they want to work, accessing the best models, and connecting the best open models into and across every cloud provider, every neocloud and into every data center and make availability on every device.”

Global Reach

Delangue and his co-founders are French, though the company was started in the United States. But when asked if acquisition by a US tech giant was evidence of Europe’s inability to grow its own tech ecosystem, Delangue pushed back. The acquisition, instead, will drive really positive effects for the European tech ecosystem, he said. “In the next few years, we hope to see more open models coming from Europe with companies like Mistral or Black Forest Labs in Germany and many,  many others.”

Boitano agreed that the acquisition would open global opportunities for AI development, not centralize them in the United States. “Every country has the opportunity to build intelligence in their country … We are big proponents of everybody participating in this economy. Every country being able to build and extend from open models gives them low-cost ways to seed startups and seed research and seed discovery in those economies. We see this as an opportunity to really help every country globally build this infrastructure to build the intelligence and participate in this AI industrial revolution.”  

Boitano took the same stance on questions of antitrust in the acquisition. “The platform is open; it’s neutral. NVIDIA’s role in this is helping them scale and expand access to AI globally,” he said. “We think regulators are going to see this as overwhelmingly positive because it’s going to infuse AI into every country, every industry, and really give everybody an opportunity to build their own intelligence.”

 “A platform like Hugging Face is almost structured, by definition, like a de-concentration platform,” Delangue argued, breaking up some of the AI power concentration. “[Hugging Face] allows for some healthy competition between these proprietary APIs that are concentrating more and more of the value and the power. This is a much-needed thing in the world.”