Nvidia has reportedly agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, in what would be one of the chipmaker’s largest acquisitions to date. The Information first reported the agreement on 26 August, citing a person with knowledge of the deal.
Neither Nvidia nor Hugging Face had publicly confirmed the acquisition at the time of writing, while both companies didn’t immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment. The reported deal would give Nvidia control of one of the biggest platforms for open AI models, datasets and applications.
It would also deepen a relationship that already includes investment and technical collaboration, as Nvidia looks beyond the chips that have made it one of the biggest winners of the AI boom.
Nvidia Reportedly Agrees to Buy Hugging Face
The $12.9 billion price is particularly striking when compared with Hugging Face’s most recent valuation. Nvidia joined Google, Salesforce and other investors in a $235 million funding round in 2023 that valued the AI company at $4.5 billion. That relationship nearly became much closer last year.
The Financial Times reported in January that Hugging Face had rejected a $500 million investment offer from Nvidia in 2025, which would have valued the company at $7 billion. Hugging Face reportedly wanted to avoid giving a dominant investor too much influence over the company.
Less than a year later, Nvidia is now reportedly prepared to pay almost three times Hugging Face’s 2023 valuation to acquire the company outright. The price also looks unusually high against Hugging Face’s current revenue. The Information reported earlier this week that the company is generating more than $150 million in annualised revenue, up 50 per cent in two months.
Annualised revenue uses the latest monthly figure to estimate what revenue would look like across a full year. According to The Information, the $12.9 billion acquisition price works out at around 80 times that forward revenue figure. The company’s recent growth has been driven partly by demand for open models, alongside compute, storage and services that help customers train and run AI systems.
Why Nvidia Wants Hugging Face
Hugging Face is often described as a repository for open AI models, but the platform now plays a much broader role in how developers build and distribute AI. Developers use Hugging Face to share models and datasets, adapt models for different hardware and access computing services needed to run them inside applications.
That puts the company in an important position between the organisations building open models and the developers putting them to work. For Nvidia, owning that platform could strengthen its position beyond the GPUs that currently power much of the AI industry. The Information reports that Nvidia leaders believe successful open models can help protect the company’s hardware dominance.
Closed-model developers including OpenAI and Anthropic are working to reduce their reliance on Nvidia by developing alternative AI chips, creating a potential long-term threat to its position in the infrastructure market. Nvidia has responded by investing more heavily in open AI.
The company has been developing its Nemotron family of open models and, according to The Information, has committed tens of billions of dollars to its own open-model efforts. Buying Hugging Face would put one of the open AI ecosystem’s most important distribution and development platforms under the same roof.
Nvidia Continues Its AI Investment Push
The reported acquisition comes as Nvidia continues to pour money into companies across the wider AI market. The chipmaker has invested billions in AI developers, infrastructure providers and other businesses connected to growing demand for AI computing. Its investments include OpenAI, while Hugging Face itself has counted Nvidia among its backers since 2023.
The scale of the latest deal would still stand out. Nvidia’s $6.9 billion agreement to acquire networking company Mellanox in 2019 was previously among its largest acquisitions. A $12.9 billion purchase of Hugging Face would comfortably exceed that figure. It also arrives alongside another strong set of expectations from Nvidia.
The company said on 26 August that it expects revenue to grow by around 70 per cent during its next fiscal year as demand for AI infrastructure continues to expand. Reuters reported that Nvidia has also committed $18 billion to equity investments through fiscal 2027. The reported agreement comes only a month after Hugging Face was caught up in an unusual security incident involving hundreds of OpenAI agents.
Investigators found that the agents compromised Hugging Face infrastructure during safety testing, with some attempting to avoid detection. There’s currently no evidence connecting that incident with Nvidia’s reported decision to acquire the company. For now, the biggest unanswered question is when, or whether, the two companies will publicly confirm the deal.
Until they do, the $12.9 billion acquisition remains based on The Information’s reporting rather than an official announcement from Nvidia or Hugging Face.
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