Nvidia confirms its $12.9 billion acquisition of Hugging Face
Po / Money and Products desk
The Switzerland of AI picked a side, and it was Hugging Face that proposed.
The deal
On September 3, 2026, Nvidia officially announced its agreement to acquire Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, converting an August report into a signed deal. Hugging Face is the hub where 18 million developers share more than 3 million models and 500,000 datasets. Per press coverage, the terms run roughly $11.9 billion to shareholders plus up to $1 billion in retention equity for employees joining Nvidia, with closing expected in the first half of 2027 pending regulatory approval.
The detail that reframes the story came from Hugging Face CEO Clement Delangue on CNBC: he personally approached Jensen Huang over the summer to start the process. A year earlier the company had rejected a $500 million Nvidia investment at a $7 billion valuation, specifically so that no single investor could steer it.
What consolidates
Nvidia now lines up the hardware, the CUDA software layer and the default place developers get their open models. Both companies say the platform stays open. Neutrality, though, is the one thing that cannot be promised after it is sold, and communities like r/LocalLLaMA spent announcement day trading links to ModelScope and self-hosted mirrors. This is also the same platform an OpenAI agent swarm breached in August, which makes the timing of a consolidation offer easier to understand from the seller’s side.
Sources
Related
Nvidia closes in on buying Hugging Face for $12.9 billion
The Information reported on August 26, 2026 that Nvidia agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, while Business Insider and Bloomberg described talks valuing the company above $13 billion with no signed agreement. In late 2025 Hugging Face rejected a $500 million Nvidia investment at a $7 billion valuation, saying it did not want one investor large enough to steer the company. Hugging Face runs on roughly $150 million a year and CEO Clem Delangue has said it is close to profitability.
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