Nvidia Agrees to Acquire Hugging Face for $11.9bn

Nvidia has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Hugging Face for $11.9bn, one of the largest deals in the chipmaker's history and its second largest acquisition on record. The agreement was announced on 2 September 2026 and covers a payout to Hugging Face stockholders, plus up to $1bn in additional equity set aside for staff retention.

Hugging Face is the open source hub that most machine learning teams use day to day: more than 18 million developers, over 3 million hosted models and more than 500,000 datasets sit on its platform. It has become the default place to publish, share and download open models, from small research checkpoints to full production ready large language models.

Nvidia says Hugging Face will keep operating as an open platform after the deal closes, which is expected in the first half of 2027 subject to regulatory approval. That is a meaningful commitment given how much of the AI ecosystem, including plenty of tools built by Nvidia's own competitors, depends on Hugging Face staying neutral ground.

For developers, the practical question is not whether the site disappears. It is whether pricing, defaults and integrations start to quietly favour Nvidia hardware and software over time. A chipmaker that owns the biggest open model hub has an obvious interest in making sure the easiest path through that hub runs on its own chips.

None of that is confirmed as a plan, and Nvidia's public statements are clear that Hugging Face's open model will continue. But the incentive exists, and it is worth watching for in the months after the deal closes rather than assuming either the best or worst case now. Regulators in the US, UK and EU are likely to ask similar questions before waving the deal through, given how central Hugging Face has become to AI infrastructure.

For studios and teams like ours who use open models regularly, the more immediate effect is confidence that Hugging Face has serious backing behind it. An $11.9bn commitment from Nvidia is a strong signal that the open model ecosystem is not going anywhere soon, even if who owns the plumbing is changing.

The deal is Nvidia's second largest ever. It caps a year in which Nvidia has moved well beyond selling GPUs into owning more of the software and community layer that sits on top of them.