Nvidia has agreed to acquire Hugging Face, the platform at the center of the open-source AI model ecosystem, for $12.9 billion. The Information first reported the agreement on Wednesday, citing a person with knowledge of the deal, and Reuters confirmed the figure. Business Insider had earlier reported talks valuing the deal near $13 billion. It ranks among the largest acquisitions in AI history and hands Nvidia the hub where millions of developers share, fine-tune, and deploy open models.
The price is a dramatic step up from the $4.5 billion valuation Hugging Face earned in its 2023 round, which counted Nvidia, Google, Amazon, Intel, and Qualcomm among its backers. Nvidia previously considered a $500 million investment that would have valued the startup at about $7 billion, an offer Hugging Face declined. The deal underscores how valuable open-weight AI companies have become as acquisition targets.
Strategically, the purchase gives Nvidia a route back into cloud computing. The company scaled back much of its DGX Cloud business last year, and Hugging Face already helps developers rent GPU capacity to run models. Owning the platform lets Nvidia steer that demand toward its own hardware while controlling the distribution layer of open AI. With quarterly revenue of $96.2 billion, up 106% year over year, Nvidia can easily absorb the price, though the deal will still face regulatory review.