NVIDIA Reportedly Nears $13 Billion Deal for Hugging Face

By Suad Seferi · Aug 28, 2026

NVIDIA is reportedly moving closer to acquiring Hugging Face, one of the most important platforms in the open AI ecosystem, in a deal valued at roughly $13 billion. The Information reported that NVIDIA had agreed to purchase the company for about $12.9 billion. Other reporting, however, suggests negotiations may not yet have resulted in a signed agreement. Neither NVIDIA nor Hugging Face has publicly confirmed the acquisition. That distinction matters. For now, this is a reported deal rather than a completed one. If it goes ahead, the acquisition would give NVIDIA control of a platform that has become central to how researchers, developers and companies find, share and deploy AI models. Hugging Face is often compared with GitHub, but for machine learning. Its platform hosts models, datasets, evaluation tools and applications used across the AI community, including thousands of open and open-weight projects. The company was valued at $4.5 billion during a $235 million funding round in 2023. NVIDIA participated in that round alongside investors including Google, Amazon, Salesforce, IBM, Intel and Qualcomm. A transaction near $13 billion would therefore represent a substantial increase from Hugging Face's last widely reported valuation. NVIDIA and Hugging Face are also not new partners. In 2023, the companies announced an integration that allowed Hugging Face developers to access NVIDIA's DGX Cloud infrastructure for training and fine-tuning AI models. NVIDIA has since expanded its own presence on Hugging Face, including through its Nemotron family of models and other research projects. More than another AI acquisition For NVIDIA, the potential value of Hugging Face goes beyond buying another technology company. NVIDIA already dominates the hardware used to train and run many advanced AI systems. Hugging Face sits at a different part of the same ecosystem: the point where developers discover models, download them, adapt them and increasingly deploy them. Owning both sides would give NVIDIA a much stronger position across the AI development stack. It would also strengthen NVIDIA's growing push into open models. The company has been investing heavily in its Nemotron model family and publicly supporting open and open-weight AI development. At the same time, several of NVIDIA's biggest customers, including Google, Amazon and other major AI companies, have been developing their own chips as they try to reduce their dependence on NVIDIA hardware. A larger open-model ecosystem gives developers alternatives to relying entirely on closed platforms such as OpenAI or Anthropic while still creating demand for the computing infrastructure needed to run those models. Hugging Face sits directly in the middle of that ecosystem. Hugging Face's independence could become the bigger question An NVIDIA acquisition would also create an uncomfortable question for the open AI community. Part of Hugging Face's importance comes from its position as a relatively neutral platform. Models from competing companies, independent researchers, universities and open-source projects can exist alongside one another. NVIDIA already has commercial relationships with many of those companies while competing with others across hardware, cloud infrastructure, software and increasingly AI models themselves. Ownership would therefore change the relationship. Developers would likely pay close attention to whether Hugging Face continued operating as an open platform, whether competing hardware and model providers received equal treatment, and how NVIDIA handled the enormous ecosystem that has grown around it. There is already evidence that independence has mattered to Hugging Face. Previous reporting indicated that the company rejected a large NVIDIA investment that could have given the chipmaker greater influence over its decisions. A full acquisition would obviously change that equation entirely. What happens next The immediate question is whether the reported agreement becomes official. Reports currently disagree on whether the companies have already reached a deal or remain in advanced negotiations. Until NVIDIA or Hugging Face confirms the transaction, the acquisition should be treated as pending. If completed near the reported $13 billion valuation, however, it would be one of NVIDIA's most consequential moves outside its traditional chip business. NVIDIA already supplies much of the computing infrastructure underneath modern AI. Buying Hugging Face would put it much closer to controlling one of the places where the models running on that infrastructure are actually built, shared and distributed.