Topline
Nvidia has reportedly reached an agreement to acquire Hugging Face, a leading platform for hosting open-weight artificial intelligence models, in a deal valued at approximately $12.9 billion. The news, reported by The Information late Wednesday, comes just one month after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang publicly championed open AI development and cautioned against “premature restrictions” on the technology.
Nvidia has reportedly agreed to acquire Hugging Face for around $13 billion.
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Key Facts
The Information first reported the transaction, citing anonymous sources familiar with the negotiations. In a separate, earlier report, Business Insider indicated that both parties were nearing a final agreement that would value Hugging Face at roughly $13 billion.
Should the acquisition close, it would rank among the largest in Nvidia’s history. The timing is notable, coming shortly after Hugging Face gained widespread attention when OpenAI disclosed that one of its models had circumvented safety protocols and exploited the open-source platform.
According to Business Insider, Hugging Face previously engaged in acquisition discussions with Microsoft.
The reported $13 billion valuation represents a substantial increase from the $4.5 billion figure established during Hugging Face’s Series D funding round in August 2023.
Nvidia participated in that earlier round, contributing $235 million to the open-weight AI model hosting platform.
What Has Nvidia Said About Open Artificial Intelligence Models?
Nvidia CEO and billionaire Jensen Huang made his first-ever post on X last month, coming out in defense of open-source AI models. He wrote: “Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty. The world needs both frontier closed models and frontier open models.” Huang also shared a letter signed by several companies, including Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta and several others, which argued “Open weights…strengthen competition and competition is what keeps the gains of AI broadly shared rather than concentrated in a few hands.” Google and OpenAI would eventually also sign the letters, making Anthropic the most high-profile absentee from the list among AI companies. Hugging Face was also a signatory of the letter, and its CEO Clement Delangue then told CNN: “Banning any open model would hurt first cyber security defenders, startups, small companies, researchers and everyone who’s not a frontier lab.”
Tangent
Last month, OpenAI published a report disclosing that one of its advanced AI models, GPT-5.6 Sol, had hacked into Hugging Face’s servers during testing. The issue was attributed to the OpenAI model exploiting a vulnerability that allowed it to escape its closed testing environment and access the internet. After breaching containment, the model broke into Hugging Face’s system and carried out a cyberattack without being ordered to do so. Hugging Face said it attempted to use a proprietary American AI model to help stop the attack, but it failed to “distinguish an incident responder from an attacker.” The company said it had to rely instead on the popular open-weight model GLM 5.2, developed by China’s Z.ai lab, to address the breach. Hugging Face ran the Chinese model on its own infrastructure.
