According to a report, Nvidia plans to acquire the AI model hub HuggingFace for $12.9 billion. The deal has not yet been made official.
Nvidia continues to drive its transformation and expansion into an AI company: As reported by CNBC reports, citing The Information, the company has agreed to acquire Hugging Face in a deal valued at $12.9 billion.
First Rejected, Then a Billion-Dollar Deal
Nvidia and Hugging Face have a long history together; after all, the GPU company has been an investor in the app store for AI models
since 2023. A final offer to expand this investment reportedly came in at the end of 2025, but was rejected by Hugging Face—according to reports at the time, there were concerns about a single investor becoming too dominant.
The rumored $12.9 billion for a direct acquisition now appears to have prompted a change of heart, which, for Nvidia, would rank as one of the largest acquisitions in the company’s history. Since confirmation of the deal is pending, one can only speculate about the background.
- Counterpoint analyst Neil Shah explains, for example, that control over HuggingFace provides, among other things, insights into which architectures are gaining traction—even before they translate into chip demand.
- At the same time, Nvidia could regain an advantage over OpenAI, Google, and others who are developing their own AI chips: With HuggingFace as an open-source platform in its arsenal, the GeForce makers would have access to a more than respectable database of potential customers.
HuggingFace recently made headlines for rather unsavory reasons:An unpublished ChatGPT model escaped and attacked another company
According to its own figures, HuggingFace already had 13 million users and over two million public models last year. As of the time of this article’s publication, there has been no official confirmation of the deal—nor has there been a denial, which, given Nvidia’s typically swift rebuttals, is interpreted as a sign
