Nvidia acquires Hugging Face for $12.93 billion in push beyond chips

Nvidia agreed to acquire open-source AI platform Hugging Face for $12.93 billion on September 3, 2026, marking its second-largest acquisition. The deal includes an $11.9 billion payment to investors and a $1 billion employee retention program. While Nvidia promises Hugging Face will remain a neutral, open platform supporting rival hardware, the acquisition represents a major strategic push beyond chips into software and developer distribution. This comes as Nvidia's broader equity portfolio surged to $99 billion, reflecting its massive role in financing the AI ecosystem.

Nvidia acquisition of Hugging Face

• ▪Nvidia Corp. agreed to acquire artificial-intelligence developer platform Hugging Face for $12.93 billion on September 3, 2026.
• ▪Under the agreement, Nvidia will pay approximately $11.9 billion to Hugging Face investors and establish an equity-based employee retention program worth up to $1 billion.
• ▪Hugging Face was previously valued at $4.5 billion during an August 2023 financing round that raised $235 million from investors including Salesforce, Advanced Micro Devices, and Amazon.
• ▪Hugging Face Chief Executive Officer Clément Delangue approached Nvidia Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang over the summer of 2026 to initiate the acquisition discussions.

Strategic shift beyond chip hardware

• ▪The acquisition represents Nvidia's second-largest transaction on record, following its $20 billion purchase of assets from chipmaker Groq in December 2025.
• ▪The acquisition of Hugging Face represents a strategic expansion for Nvidia beyond supplying graphics processing units into software, developer platforms, and the AI distribution layer.
• ▪Nvidia's acquisition of Hugging Face serves as a hedge against major customers like Meta Platforms, Microsoft, and OpenAI developing their own custom AI chips.

Open AI model ecosystem commitment

• ▪Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue characterized the open model hub as a de-concentration platform to counter the concentration of AI power in proprietary application programming interfaces.
• ▪Nvidia is already one of the largest contributors to Hugging Face, having published more than 500 models and 250 open datasets on the platform.
• ▪Hugging Face hosts more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets, and 1 million applications used by over 18 million developers and researchers.

Nvidia equity investment expansion

• ▪Nvidia agreed to provide up to $105 billion in conditional credit support or guarantees for an OpenAI data center in Ohio.
• ▪Nvidia's equity investments grew to $99 billion as of July 26, 2026, up from approximately $7 billion a year earlier and $2.2 billion two years earlier.
• ▪Nvidia and six investment firms announced partnerships in August 2026 to mobilize over $500 billion in financing for Nvidia's graphics processing units.
• ▪Nvidia committed over $40 billion in equity investments across the AI stack in 2026, including a $30 billion stake in OpenAI and a $2 billion investment in CoreWeave.

Platform neutrality assurances

• ▪Nvidia Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang stated that Hugging Face will remain an open platform and developers will not be required to use Nvidia hardware to build or deploy products.
• ▪Hugging Face will retain its brand, leadership, and neutrality, continuing to support multiple clouds, frameworks, and competing accelerator architectures.