Major corporate operation by Nvidia. The artificial intelligence (AI) chip giant has completed the acquisition of the start-up Hugging Face in a transaction valued at approximately 13 billion dollars (almost 11.2 billion euros). Nvidia, the largest company in the world by market capitalization, has stated that it will keep the Hugging Face platform open and consistent with the current practices of the start-up.
The purchase, aimed at strengthening its presence in AI, is the second largest in history carried out by Nvidia, after acquiring Groq’s assets at the end of 2025, in a licensing deal valued at 20 billion dollars. Nvidia, which has strong investment activity in AI companies, also closed a 6 billion licensing agreement with the start-up Poolside in 2025.
Nvidia’s shares show little change in Nasdaq pre-market trading after the news broke. However, in the last month, they have appreciated by more than 12%, surpassing 224 dollars, close to the all-time high of 236 dollars recorded in mid-May. The company’s market capitalization exceeds 5.4 trillion dollars.
“Under this commitment, Hugging Face will continue to allow model creators, developers, and users to upload and download the models and datasets they choose, and will support other semiconductor providers,” the giant said in a statement.
The purchase of Hugging Face represents the most important step to date in Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s strategy to drive AI adoption and expand its customer base. The deal gives Nvidia control of one of the key platforms where developers showcase and share AI models.
Huang is committed to promoting so-called open-source models to prevent the technology of a few large companies from dominating AI. Some of those companies are currently Nvidia’s largest customers but continue with their own chip projects.
Nvidia was already an investor in Hugging Face, along with Google (Alphabet), Amazon, Intel, and Salesforce. Founded in 2016, Hugging Face operates a platform for sharing AI models that others can freely use. The start-up was valued at 4.5 billion dollars in a funding round three years ago.
“We will expand the Hugging Face platform, strengthen its infrastructure, and broaden access to AI for developers and institutions worldwide,” Nvidia said, adding that the start-up has created something extraordinary: a dynamic space for the open model developer community.
According to Nvidia, more than 18 million developers, researchers, and creators use Hugging Face to share over three million models, 500,000 datasets, and 1 million applications. Similarly, the company led by Jensen Huang notes that more than 200,000 companies use the platform to discover, evaluate, customize, and deploy AI.
“Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem. Developers will be able to choose the models, frameworks, cloud and inference service providers, and computing platforms they want. It will not be necessary to use Nvidia’s computing infrastructure to develop or deploy on Hugging Face,” the giant said.
Nvidia makes it clear that Hugging Face will continue to support open-source models and open-weight models from across the ecosystem, from all model creators. “It will continue to support development and deployment across multiple clouds and accelerators, so creators can use the hardware and infrastructure that best suit their work,” the company says.
Hugging Face was at the center of a cybersecurity incident in which a model OpenAI was testing inadvertently hacked the platform. The breach raised concerns about the security of cutting-edge AI technology. According to Bloomberg, OpenAI admitted it could have reacted sooner to prevent the attack on Hugging Face’s systems.
