NVIDIA agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $12.93 billion

NVIDIA has agreed to acquire Hugging Face, the platform developers use to publish and download open AI models and datasets, in a transaction the chip supplier valued at $12,930,300,000.

NVIDIA announced the agreement on September 3, 2026, having signed it the previous day, September 2, 2026. The terms appeared the same day in a Form 8-K filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission: a purchase price of approximately $11.9 billion payable to Hugging Face stockholders, subject to adjustments, plus an equity-based retention program of up to approximately $1.0 billion for Hugging Face employees who join NVIDIA.

The deal has not closed. NVIDIA expects it to do so in the first half of 2027, subject to customary closing conditions that include required regulatory approvals.

What NVIDIA would be buying

Hugging Face runs a public repository through which developers distribute trained model weights, datasets and small applications. By NVIDIA’s count, the platform hosts more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets and 1 million applications, serves more than 18 million developers, researchers and creators, and is used by more than 200,000 companies. None of those figures is independently audited in the sources opened for this story.

NVIDIA is already one of the platform’s larger publishers, a relationship that predates the agreement: it says it has released more than 500 models and more than 250 open datasets there.

NVIDIA’s openness commitments

In its announcement, NVIDIA said Hugging Face would continue to operate under its existing practices. Users would stay free to choose which models and datasets they use, and the platform would keep supporting other silicon vendors, clouds, inference providers and accelerators. NVIDIA compute, the company said, would not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face.

In July, NVIDIA joined an industry letter opposing restrictions on open-weight AI models.

NVIDIA identified its post-closing plans for Hugging Face, and the anticipated benefits of the transaction, as forward-looking statements subject to risks and uncertainties. Nothing in the announcement or the filing establishes that the platform will remain open and hardware-agnostic once the deal closes.

What NVIDIA did not disclose

NVIDIA did not release the merger agreement itself, leaving termination rights, breakup fees, voting arrangements and the full set of closing conditions unresolved. The announcement and the filing also stop short of naming the jurisdictions or regulators whose approvals are required. Neither document describes an enforceable governance mechanism binding NVIDIA to its openness commitments after closing, or sets out a post-closing plan for model moderation, ranking, discovery, data access or the treatment of competing accelerator vendors.