Nvidia buys Hugging Face for $12.9B — SkimNews
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- Nvidia agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, announced Thursday by CEO Jensen Huang, extending the chipmaker's reach beyond chips into AI developer tools.
- Hugging Face serves more than 18 million developers and hosts over 3 million models, and will remain an open platform where developers can freely choose their models, frameworks, cloud providers and computing platforms.
- Nvidia hardware will not be required to build or deploy through Hugging Face, and the platform will continue supporting models from other developers as well as multiple cloud and accelerator providers.
- The deal allocates approximately $11.9 billion to Hugging Face investors plus up to $1 billion through an equity-based retention program for employees who join Nvidia, per Reuters.
- The transaction is expected to close in 2027, per the Financial Times, though Nvidia's announcement did not specify which regulatory approvals are required.
- Hugging Face disclosed a security breach about one month before the announcement, in which an autonomous AI agent gained unauthorized access to internal datasets and service credentials.
Why it matters: Nvidia is paying nearly $13 billion to own the dominant neutral hub where AI developers share and deploy models, yet Huang explicitly pledged the platform will stay hardware-agnostic — a move Yahoo Finance frames as a direct warning to AMD and Intel, while keeping Nvidia's chips as the default for the 18 million developers already on the ecosystem.
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