NVIDIA has agreed to acquire artificial intelligence platform Hugging Face for $12.93 billion in one of its largest deals, strengthening the chipmaker’s position in the growing open-model AI ecosystem.
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang announced the agreement on Thursday, saying the acquisition would help scale Hugging Face’s platform, strengthen its infrastructure and expand access to AI for developers and institutions worldwide.
The transaction includes about $11.9 billion to be paid to Hugging Face shareholders and an equity-based retention programme worth up to $1 billion for employees who join NVIDIA.
The deal is expected to close in the first half of 2027, subject to required regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions, meaning the acquisition is not yet complete.
The regulatory review could be important because the deal brings one of the world’s largest AI chipmakers together with a major platform for developing, sharing and deploying open-source and open-weight AI models.
NVIDIA has also disclosed that changes in government rules covering artificial intelligence could affect Hugging Face’s platform and the benefits it expects from the acquisition.
In its regulatory filing, NVIDIA warned that governments could introduce requirements governing the development, training, release, distribution, transfer and use of AI models, including open-source models.
Such rules could restrict models or datasets available through Hugging Face, require changes to its platform or increase compliance costs.
NVIDIA also highlighted the international dimension of the regulatory risk, noting that some popular open-source models originate in China and are downloaded, modified and tested by developers globally.
“Restrictions affecting models or technology from particular regions could therefore have an impact on Hugging Face and NVIDIA”, the company said.
The acquisition comes as regulators in the United States and other markets are paying closer attention to the concentration of power in the technology and AI industries, even though NVIDIA has previously faced scrutiny over its acquisition strategy, including concerns around transactions involving AI chip technology.
See also: Google Beats US Bid to Force AdX Sale
Hugging Face has become one of the largest platforms for developers working with open-source and open-weight AI models.
Huang said more than 18 million developers, researchers and creators use the platform to share more than three million models, 500,000 datasets and one million applications.
More than 200,000 companies also use Hugging Face to discover, evaluate, customise and deploy AI technologies, according to NVIDIA.
Despite the acquisition, NVIDIA said Hugging Face would remain an open platform and continue supporting models, frameworks, cloud providers and computing platforms from across the AI ecosystem.
Huang said developers would not be required to use NVIDIA computing hardware to build or deploy through Hugging Face.
The platform will also continue supporting open-source and open-weight models as well as multi-cloud and multi-accelerator development and deployment.
NVIDIA said the acquisition would provide Hugging Face with additional infrastructure, engineering resources and global reach while improving capabilities in areas including platform reliability, safety, model evaluation, inference and deployment.
The acquisition would give NVIDIA greater access to a large community of AI developers as demand for open models grows.
Reports say that the deal could also give NVIDIA valuable insight into how developers collaborate, test and deploy AI models.
NVIDIA has already been a major contributor to Hugging Face, with more than 500 models and 250 open datasets released on the platform, according to Huang.
The companies will now await the necessary regulatory clearances before completing the transaction, with closing currently expected in the first half of 2027.
About the Author
Cecilia Attah is a tech analyst with a degree from Benue State University. She covers tech news and startups at TechRegard with a focus on how technology is transforming Africa and shaping the global landscape.
