Nvidia Confirms Hugging Face Deal at $12.93 Billion

The deal we reported a week ago with a "not yet confirmed" caveat is now official: Nvidia announced on September 3, on its own blog, that it is acquiring Hugging Face for $12.93 billion. Closing is expected in the first half of 2027, subject to regulatory approval. Our August 27 report rested on The Information's leak; the number held.

The terms

Three commitments stand out in Nvidia's statement. The Hugging Face brand and the hugging-face emoji stay. The platform remains "an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem," with continued support for open-source and open-weight models, multi-cloud and multi-accelerator. The most consequential line: Nvidia compute will not be required to build or deploy through Hugging Face. Jensen Huang frames the goal as making AI "more open, more capable and more accessible to people and institutions around the world," and says founder Clément Delangue came to him "as he considered the next chapter of Hugging Face," which puts the initiative on the seller's side.

Nvidia's stated investment areas: platform reliability, safety and model evaluation; inference and deployment infrastructure; engineering support and global scale.

What is being bought

Reuters' figures: more than 18 million developers, researchers and creators; more than 3 million models shared on the platform; more than 200,000 companies using it to find and deploy AI. Annual revenue is around $150 million, so the price is roughly 85 times sales. Set against Nvidia's projected $200 billion of free cash flow for fiscal 2027, BD8 CEO Barbara Doran calls it manageable, and says the move positions Nvidia "as much more of an AI platform rather than just a supplier of chips." Nvidia shares rose about 2% on the day.

The timing is the story

The Decoder's framing is apt: Nvidia is buying the front door to open AI while the closed labs design their own silicon. Put OpenAI's Jalapeño chip, Google's TPUs and Anthropic's multi-supplier strategy side by side and the risk is visible: Nvidia's largest customers are, over time, its most credible competitors. The open-model ecosystem, by contrast, still runs overwhelmingly on Nvidia hardware, and its hub now belongs to Nvidia.

For teams that build on Hugging Face

Nothing changes in the short term; closing is nine months away and the "no Nvidia hardware required" commitment is in writing. Two things are worth watching over the medium term. First, the trajectory of the free tier and Inference API pricing: a promise to invest in inference infrastructure can also mean a bigger paid tier. Second, how much priority Hugging Face integrations for AMD, Intel and cloud-native accelerators retain. Mirroring the weights of your critical models in your own storage was already good hygiene; this announcement makes it more so. Antitrust review will run into 2027, and the terms can still move.

Sources: Nvidia blog announcement, Reuters via Yahoo Finance, The Decoder