NVIDIA has formally agreed to acquire Hugging Face — one of the most important hubs for sharing open AI models — at a value close to $12.9 billion, a deal that could change the course of the open-source AI ecosystem.
On September 2, 2026 NVIDIA announced a definitive agreement to acquire Hugging Face. Under the deal, about $11.9 billion goes to Hugging Face shareholders, and a program of up to roughly one billion dollars is planned to retain and motivate employees who join NVIDIA.
Hugging Face is one of the world's best-known platforms for sharing machine learning models, datasets and development tools; more than 18 million developers and researchers use it, and it hosts over three million models, five hundred thousand datasets and one million applications.
NVIDIA says Hugging Face will remain an open platform after the acquisition, keeping uploads and downloads of models and datasets open to all developers, and support for other chipmakers (not only NVIDIA). That pledge matters because much of Hugging Face's credibility in the open-source community depends on exactly this neutrality.
The deal is not final yet; closing is expected by the first half of 2027, subject to regulatory approval. Even so, the announcement alone shows that large investments in AI infrastructure are no longer limited to proprietary models, and the open-source ecosystem has become a strategic asset for hardware giants.
For technical teams that use Hugging Face's open models in internal projects, the practical takeaway is to follow how this integration unfolds in the coming months and its possible effect on access terms, infrastructure pricing and model-hosting policies.
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