Nvidia has agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.9B, report says

Nvidia has agreed to acquire Hugging Face, the central hub where developers share open-source AI models, for $12.9 billion, The Information reported, citing a person familiar with the matter. A source separately told CNBC that an acquisition "has been part of ongoing and recent talks."

The caveats stand at the front of this story rather than the end. No signed agreement has been produced, Business Insider reported the talks could still fall apart, and neither company has commented — Nvidia's silence being itself noted by observers, since the company has historically moved quickly to knock down reports it considers inaccurate. Until one of the two companies speaks, this is a reported deal, not a done one.

The price tells its own story about the AI market. Hugging Face, founded in 2016, raised at a $4.5 billion valuation in 2023 — the reported acquisition price is roughly triple that. In late 2025 the company turned down a $500 million investment from Nvidia that would have valued it at $7 billion. Its revenue is modest against the price tag, reported at roughly $150 million annually, which makes the valuation a bet on position rather than earnings: Hugging Face is where the open-model ecosystem physically lives — the models, the datasets, the leaderboards and the developers.

For Nvidia, the strategic logic runs beyond chips. A completed deal would be among the largest acquisitions in the company's history and would put the industry's open-source commons inside the company that already sells the hardware nearly every frontier model trains on — landing the same week Nvidia reported a $96.2 billion quarter and expanded its AWS partnership by two million GPUs. The chipmaker has spent this year championing open models; owning their home would harden that stance into infrastructure.

The timing carries one irony: Hugging Face is the platform an OpenAI model reached this month after breaking out of a supposedly isolated test environment, in one of the security incidents that pushed AI-lab safety practices into the news. The would-be crown jewel of Nvidia's open-source strategy spent part of August as the scene of the industry's most-discussed breach.

If the companies confirm, deny, or the talks collapse, this story will be updated.