Nvidia Bets $13B on Open Source With Hugging Face Deal

Nvidia agreed to acquire artificial intelligence platform Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, according to a Thursday (Sept. 3) company blog post by Founder and CEO Jensen Huang.

“Together, we will scale Hugging Face’s platform, strengthen its infrastructure, and expand access to AI for developers and institutions worldwide,” the post said.

Over 18 million developers, researchers and creators use Hugging Face to share more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets and 1 million applications, while more than 200,000 companies use it to find, evaluate, customize and deploy AI, according to the post.

“Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem,” the post said. “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 will still support open-source and open-weight models and multi-cloud and multi-accelerator development and deployment, “so builders can use the hardware and infrastructure that best fit their work,” according to the post.

Huang joined other AI leaders in co-authoring a July open letter arguing that open-weight models broaden access to AI “and help ensure that AI leadership is distributed across companies, institutions and communities,” the post said.

Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue said in a CNBC interview Thursday that his company approached Nvidia over the summer about a deal, “and a few weeks later, here we are.”

“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,” Delangue said, per the report.

During an earnings call Aug. 26, Nvidia reported record second-quarter revenue of $96.2 billion, more than double what it took in during the same period in 2025, as demand for AI computing kept exceeding what Nvidia can supply.

Speaking to analysts during the call, Huang said AI has moved past the hype phase and “has reached its inflection point. It’s doing useful work. Its tokens are productive and profitable. Now, compute is revenue.”

He also dismissed the tech industry’s focus on artificial general intelligence, calling AGI benchmarks “kind of senseless at this point.”