NVIDIA has announced an agreement to acquire Hugging Face for approximately $12.93 billion. This acquisition, revealed on September 4, 2026, aims to scale Hugging Face’s platform, enhance its infrastructure, and broaden access to artificial intelligence for developers and institutions globally.
Hugging Face, founded by Clem, Julien, and Thomas, has become a central hub for the open model developer community. The platform currently serves over 18 million developers, researchers, and creators who share more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets, and 1 million applications. More than 200,000 companies utilize the platform for discovering, evaluating, customizing, and deploying AI solutions.
NVIDIA stated that Hugging Face will maintain its status as an open platform within the AI ecosystem. Developers will retain the flexibility to choose their preferred models, frameworks, cloud providers, inference service providers, and computing platforms. NVIDIA compute will not be a mandatory requirement for building or deploying through Hugging Face.
The platform will continue to support open source and open weight models from various builders across the ecosystem. It will also maintain its support for multi-cloud and multi-accelerator development and deployment, allowing builders to use the hardware and infrastructure that best suits their projects.
NVIDIA has emphasized the importance of open weights to the AI economy, co-authoring an open letter on the subject. This perspective highlights that open weights expand access to AI and help distribute AI leadership among companies, institutions, and communities. Open models enable startups, businesses, universities, and public institutions to build upon advanced capabilities without needing to train every model from scratch, facilitating the matching of the right model to the right task. This approach is seen as crucial for advancing AI safely, strengthening cybersecurity and sovereignty, accelerating innovation, and extending AI’s reach to various sectors globally, including factories, hospitals, farms, classrooms, and Main Street businesses.
NVIDIA has a longstanding commitment to open weight models, demonstrated through multi-year investments and significant contributions to open source platforms, including Hugging Face. The company has contributed hundreds of open models and datasets to Hugging Face, making it the largest contributor of open models and data to the platform, with over 500 models and more than 250 open datasets released. NVIDIA builds its models, libraries, and tools in the open to allow developers worldwide to use, modify, and build upon them.
As the potential for open models grows, Hugging Face is positioned to serve the global AI community on an unprecedented scale. NVIDIA’s infrastructure, engineering expertise, and global reach are expected to enhance platform reliability, safety, model evaluation, inference, and deployment capabilities, all while preserving the open ecosystem that has been fundamental to Hugging Face.
