Three years ago, Hugging Face was just a place where developers dropped AI models for each other to use for free. Now someone is paying $12.9 billion for it.
Nvidia announced the acquisition on September 3. Of the total, $11.9 billion goes to Hugging Face shareholders, with up to $1 billion more set aside as retention equity for employees — a cushion meant to keep the team in place once the deal closes, which Nvidia expects in the first half of 2027, pending regulatory approval.
Hugging Face has long been called the 'GitHub of AI': the platform hosts 3 million models, 500,000 datasets and a million ready-made apps, used by 18 million developers and more than 200,000 companies. Founded in 2016 as a teen chatbot app before pivoting into open AI tooling, it has raised over $395 million to date — while pulling in a comparatively modest $150 million a year in revenue.
Nvidia had tried before: a few years back it offered around $500 million and was turned down. This time, according to CNBC, the approach came from Hugging Face itself — CEO Clément Delangue reportedly reached out to Nvidia's Jensen Huang weeks ahead of the deal, saying the platform simply needed more compute, more support and more weight in the market.
For Nvidia, this is its second-largest acquisition ever, behind only the $20 billion Groq deal struck in December. The pattern is familiar: a company that already dominates AI chip manufacturing is now moving up the stack, toward the place where developers actually pick and distribute models.
Huang has publicly promised Hugging Face will stay open and won't require Nvidia hardware — the platform will keep working across clouds and accelerators. For now, that's just a promise. The deal hasn't closed yet, and a new owner's real priorities tend to show up only after the ink dries.
