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NVIDIA to Acquire Hugging Face for $12.93 Billion

The acquisition folds the dominant distribution hub for open AI models into the company that already leads AI chip sales, giving NVIDIA control over both the hardware and the software layer of open-source AI development.

Key Facts

  • NVIDIA announced on September 3, 2026, that it will acquire Hugging Face for $12.9303 billion, approximately 2 trillion yen.
  • Hugging Face was founded in 2016 and has raised more than $395 million to date.
  • Hugging Face is used by over 18 million developers, researchers, and creators, with more than 3 million models and over 500,000 datasets publicly available.
  • The company was valued at $4.5 billion during a 2023 funding round led by Salesforce Ventures, with participation from Google, Amazon, IBM, and NVIDIA.
  • NVIDIA publishes over 500 models and over 250 datasets on Hugging Face and is the largest contributor of open models and datasets to the platform.

Reporting from 3 sources: ASCII.jp, GameBusiness.jp, GIGAZINE.

NVIDIA to Acquire Hugging Face for $12.93 Billion

NVIDIA officially announced on September 3, 2026, that it will acquire Hugging Face, the open-source AI platform often called the "GitHub of AI," for $12.9303 billion, roughly 2 trillion yen. The deal is expected to close after regulatory approval. Hugging Face, founded in 2016, hosts over 3 million models, more than 500,000 datasets, and over 1 million applications, used by more than 18 million developers, researchers, and creators. Its corporate users exceed 200,000. The company was valued at $4.5 billion during a 2023 funding round led by Salesforce Ventures, with participation from Google, Amazon, IBM, and NVIDIA. Recent annualized revenue has reached approximately $150 million. Reports of the acquisition first appeared on August 26, 2026, and the deal has materialized as reported. NVIDIA stated that Hugging Face will remain an open platform, supporting multi-cloud and multi-accelerator environments, and that using NVIDIA computing products will not be required for development or deployment. NVIDIA already publishes over 500 models and over 250 datasets on Hugging Face. Hugging Face CEO Clement Delangue said the founders and entire team will be retained, and its independence from NVIDIA's computing resources will be maintained.

NVIDIA wrapped its own name into the price. The $12.9303 billion figure, read as "129303," is the decimal form of the Unicode code point for the 🤗 emoji, which is Hugging Face's mascot. Co-founder Thomas Wolf said the number also encodes references to both companies. He posted on X that the team did not anticipate, back in 2016 "as a tiny team of scrappy underdogs," how much the field would grow.

Hugging Face has raised more than $395 million to date. Reports say it turned down a $500 million acquisition offer from NVIDIA last year. CEO Clement Delangue said on X that scaling further requires more computing resources, which led to the discussions.

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang framed the deal around open models, saying they "enable safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and adoption, and enable sovereignty." Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said he looks forward to the growth of the open model ecosystem with NVIDIA and Hugging Face. Google CEO Sundar Pichai noted Google is an investor in Hugging Face and will remain a partner.

Hugging Face also operates ZeroGPU, a service that runs AI on high-performance GPUs for free without an account. NVIDIA is already the largest contributor of open models and datasets to the platform.

Synthesized by Yomimono from the 3 cited sources below, including Japanese-language reporting where cited, then editorially reviewed before publishing.

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