Hugging Face

Illustration for the Nvidia Hugging Face acquisition story
moneyopen source

Nvidia confirms its $12.9 billion acquisition of Hugging Face

On September 3, 2026, Nvidia officially announced its agreement to acquire Hugging Face, the open-source AI hub where 18 million developers share more than 3 million models and 500,000 datasets. Per press coverage the terms are roughly $11.9 billion to shareholders plus up to $1 billion in retention equity, closing expected in the first half of 2027 pending regulators. Hugging Face CEO Clement Delangue told CNBC he personally approached Jensen Huang over the summer, a year after rejecting a $500 million Nvidia investment to stay independent.

Photo of the Microduck robot for the Hugging Face story
roboticsopen source

Hugging Face's $399 robot duck took pre-orders every 5 seconds

Pollen Robotics, the robotics arm of Hugging Face, opened pre-orders on August 27, 2026 for Microduck: a $399 bipedal robot duck, 25 cm tall, with 15 motors, a camera, a depth sensor and an articulated beak. It walks, sits, crouches, self-recovers from falls and roller-skates. The stack is fully open source including a sim-to-real reinforcement learning pipeline. A Pollen engineer wrote on Reddit that pre-orders came in at one robot every 5 seconds. Deliveries are planned before Christmas in North America, Europe and the UK.