Nvidia has agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, in one of its biggest moves to expand beyond AI chips and deepen its presence in the software and developer ecosystem.

The deal gives Nvidia control of one of the world’s largest platforms for open-source and open-weight AI models, raising questions about how the acquisition could shape the future of open AI.

Hugging Face has become a key platform for AI developers, researchers and companies to share, test and deploy models. The platform currently hosts more than 3 million AI models, 500,000 datasets and 1 million applications, and is used by more than 18 million developers, researchers and creators. More than 200,000 companies also use the platform for AI development and deployment.

The acquisition could strengthen Nvidia’s position across the wider AI stack. Until now, the company has been best known for its powerful graphics processors and AI accelerators.

By bringing Hugging Face into its ecosystem, Nvidia can gain a stronger connection with developers building the next generation of AI applications. The company has also been expanding its own open-model efforts, with more than 500 models and 250 open datasets already released on Hugging Face.

For developers, the biggest question is whether Hugging Face will remain truly open after the acquisition. Nvidia has said the platform will continue supporting models, frameworks, cloud providers and hardware from across the AI ecosystem. It has also said that developers will not be required to use Nvidia computing systems to build or deploy models through Hugging Face.

However, the deal could attract regulatory attention because of Nvidia’s already dominant position in AI hardware. Hugging Face hosts several popular open models from companies and developers around the world, including Chinese AI models. Nvidia itself has acknowledged that future regulations could affect which models and datasets can be hosted on the platform.

The deal is expected to close in the first half of 2027, subject to regulatory approvals and other customary conditions. For Nvidia, the acquisition is a clear attempt to make its influence in AI extend beyond chips and into the tools, models and communities that power the technology.

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