NVIDIA to buy Hugging Face for $12.93B, deal closes H1 2027

NVIDIA has agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, the company announced on September 3. The deal is expected to close in the first half of 2027.

Hugging Face's platform hosts three million models, half a million datasets and a million applications, used by more than 18 million developers across over 200,000 companies. NVIDIA is already the largest contributor of open models and data there, having released 500+ models and 250+ open datasets on the site.

CEO Jensen Huang framed the transaction as a personal handoff. "I am honored that Clem came to me as he considered the next chapter of Hugging Face and believed NVIDIA would be a great home for the company, its community and the future of open models," Huang wrote. Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue told CNBC his team approached Huang over the summer, saying Hugging Face "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."

Both sides went out of their way to promise openness. The announcement states plainly that "NVIDIA compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face" and that the platform will "continue to support open source and open weight models from across the ecosystem."

The economics are unusual. Engadget reports NVIDIA will pay up to $1 billion in employee retention bonuses on top of the purchase price, and calls this NVIDIA's second-biggest purchase after paying $20 billion for Groq assets at the end of last year. Two experts in our Who's Who directory shared the source link within hours of it going live.