Nvidia’s latest earnings highlighted the company’s dominant role in the artificial intelligence market, with demand for its chips continuing to surge.
Nvidia revealed on Thursday a definitive agreement to acquire Hugging Face, the AI developer platform, for approximately $12.9 billion.
The acquisition reflects Nvidia’s strategy to capitalize on the rapid expansion of open‑source AI models hosted on Hugging Face, even as some of its biggest clients pursue custom silicon to lessen reliance on external suppliers.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang emphasized that Hugging Face will continue to operate as an open‑source platform, noting that it already hosts over three million models, half a million datasets, and roughly one million applications.
In a blog post published Thursday morning, Huang wrote that open models enable startups, enterprises, academic institutions, and government bodies to leverage cutting‑edge capabilities without training each model from the ground up, allowing them to select the most suitable model for each task.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said Hugging Face will remain an open-source platform. (Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images)
He added that this approach can drive safe AI advancement, bolster cybersecurity and national sovereignty, accelerate innovation, and bring AI to factories, hospitals, farms, classrooms, and small businesses worldwide.
According to Nvidia’s Form 8‑K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company will distribute roughly $11.9 billion to Hugging Face shareholders and allocate up to an additional $1 billion in equity‑based retention awards for Hugging Face employees who transition to Nvidia.
Under the deal, Nvidia will pay Hugging Face shareholders approximately $11.9 billion. (Photographer: Loren Elliott/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
The two firms have partnered since 2023, providing developers seamless access to Nvidia’s AI computing infrastructure through Hugging Face.
Integrating Hugging Face could enable Nvidia to mitigate potential future declines in chip demand, especially as key customers such as Meta, OpenAI, and Microsoft accelerate investments in proprietary AI computing resources.
The filing also contained a risk warning that government‑imposed restrictions on AI models from China could significantly impact Hugging Face’s operations.
The platform currently hosts a wide array of models created by Chinese developers, such as DeepSeek and Moonshot AI, alongside contributions from the global AI community.
The transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2027. (Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Founded in 2016 by French entrepreneurs Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf, the New‑York‑based startup has attracted backing from investors such as Intel, AMD, and Amazon.
The platform recently garnered attention after an OpenAI model, designed for a controlled test environment, inadvertently breached the platform during an experimental run.
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