The inquiries the Justice Department has made about the acquisition are part of a larger investigation into Nvidia’s conduct that agency began during the Biden administration and has continued during the Trump administration, according to the report.
For the wider investigation, the agency has been asking about Nvidia’s other acquisitions, investments, sales practices and whether it pressures its customers, per the report.
An investigation is not evidence of wrongdoing and may not result in lawsuits, the report said.
The Justice Department and Nvidia both declined Reuters’ request for comment on the claims, per the report.
Nvidia has said in the past that after its acquisition, Hugging Face would continue to work with a variety of chip, cloud and AI companies, according to the report.
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CNBC reported Wednesday that it confirmed the probe with an unnamed source after the Reuters report was published.
Bloomberg said Wednesday that it reported in September that the Department of Justice was looking into whether Nvidia structured its licensing agreement with AI chip startup Groq in a way that would avoid antitrust review.
Bloomberg has also reported that Nvidia has considered a deal with Reflection AI, it said Wednesday.
Nvidia Founder and CEO Jensen Huang announced on Sept. 3 that the company agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.9 billion.
“Together, we will scale Hugging Face’s platform, strengthen its infrastructure, and expand access to AI for developers and institutions worldwide,” Huang said.
Huang also said in the announcement: “Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem. Developers will choose the models they want, the frameworks they want, the clouds and inference service providers they want, and the computing platforms they want. Nvidia compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face.”
Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue told CNBC at the time: “During the summer, I think we realized that Hugging Face and open-source AI in general was at the turning point, and that it needed more, more resources, more scale, more visibility.”
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