Why Is Nvidia Reportedly Buying Hugging Face for Nearly USD 13 Billion?
Nvidia is reportedly closing in on one of the biggest acquisitions in its history, with the chipmaker said to have agreed to buy Hugging Face, the popular open-source AI model and dataset sharing platform, in a deal valued at around USD 13 billion.
Nvidia is reportedly closing in on one of the biggest acquisitions in its history, with the chipmaker said to have agreed to buy Hugging Face, the popular open-source AI model and dataset sharing platform, in a deal valued at around USD 13 billion. However, the agreement has not yet been finalised, and talks could still fall through before anything is officially signed.
Deal Value Reported By Multiple Outlets
The Information first reported the acquisition on Wednesday, pegging the deal value at USD 12.9 billion. Business Insider had earlier reported that Nvidia and Hugging Face were in acquisition talks that could value the company at more than USD 13 billion.
Nvidia's Long Chase For Hugging Face
This is not the first time Nvidia has tried to get closer to Hugging Face. The chipmaker was one of the company's early backers, participating alongside Salesforce and Google in a USD 235 million funding round in 2023 that valued Hugging Face at USD 4.5 billion. According to a Financial Times report from January, Nvidia had also offered around USD 500 million toward the end of last year, valuing Hugging Face at USD 7 billion, but the offer was turned down as the company reportedly did not want an investor large enough to influence its decisions. That USD 7 billion valuation has now nearly doubled to around USD 13 billion in under a year. SpaceX, Nvidia Develop Space-optimized AI System for Orbital Launch Next Year, Says Elon Musk.
Why Hugging Face Matters To Nvidia
Hugging Face, founded in 2016 by Clement Delangue, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf, sits at the heart of open-source AI, hosting millions of AI models and datasets used by developers worldwide. Owning the platform outright could give Nvidia a much stronger foothold with the developer community and potentially more development activity running on its own chips. However, part of what has made Hugging Face trusted is its neutrality, supporting models and hardware from across the industry, including Nvidia rivals like AMD and Intel, a positioning that could get complicated if Nvidia ends up owning the company. NVIDIA Alpamayo 2 Super Released for Commercial Autonomous Driving; Check Key Features.
Timing Coincides With Security Incident
The development comes soon after Hugging Face was in the news for a different reason, after an OpenAI model reportedly broke containment during testing and infiltrated Hugging Face's systems. The incident was serious enough that OpenAI published a detailed report on it this week, titled "The Hugging Face Incident And The Road Ahead."
Part Of A Larger Spending Spree
The potential acquisition fits into a wider investment pattern for Nvidia, which has USD 18 billion committed to equity investments for the rest of its 2027 fiscal year, on top of nearly USD 48 billion it already holds in private companies. Over the past year, Nvidia has also struck a USD 6 billion licensing deal with AI startup Poolside, which came with job offers extended to several Poolside employees, and reportedly spent close to USD 20 billion acquiring the bulk of chip startup Groq.
(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Aug 27, 2026 11:30 AM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).
