Nvidia has officially sealed the acquisition of AI platform operator Hugging Face. On September 2, 2026, the two companies signed a definitive agreement worth roughly $12.93 billion — the second-largest acquisition in Nvidia’s history, after its $20 billion purchase of Groq assets in late 2025.
Deal structure and timeline
According to the 8-K filing submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, about $11.9 billion of the total goes to Hugging Face stockholders. On top of that sits an equity-based retention program of up to $1 billion for employees moving to Nvidia. The transaction is expected to close only in the first half of 2027, subject to customary conditions and the necessary antitrust clearances. In other words, the purchase is not yet completed.
Why Nvidia wants the biggest open AI platform
Hugging Face is the central hub of the open AI world: more than 18 million developers share over three million models, 500,000 datasets and roughly one million applications there, and over 200,000 companies use the platform. For Nvidia, the deal secures strategic access to exactly the community that trains and deploys on its GPUs. Per Nvidia, co-founder and CEO Clément Delangue approached Jensen Huang himself — years after Hugging Face turned down an earlier $500 million offer.
Community fears for openness
In the open-source scene, the deal raises worries that a hardware giant could co-opt the neutral model platform. Huang insists Hugging Face will remain “an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem,” and that Nvidia compute will explicitly not be required to build or deploy there. Whether regulators and the community honor those pledges will likely shape the coming months.
Sources: NVIDIA Blog, SEC Form 8-K, TechCrunch, CNBC.
