Nvidia pledges an open Hugging Face

Nvidia has agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, bringing the open-model platform under the ownership of the dominant AI chipmaker, according to Thenewstack.

At a glance

• Nvidia says builders will not need Nvidia compute to build on or deploy through Hugging Face, and the platform will keep supporting model makers across the ecosystem.
• In its SEC filing, Nvidia said roughly $11.9 billion will go to Hugging Face stockholders, while up to $1 billion is reserved for employee retention awards after closing.
• The transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2027, subject to customary closing conditions and regulatory approvals, and Nvidia flags potential open-source AI compliance costs.

Hugging Face operates as a neutral place where developers can find and deploy open models across competing clouds and accelerators. Nvidia's commitments appear designed to preserve that role after the acquisition, while support for rival hardware will likely become the clearest test of whether the platform retains its neutral operating position within the AI ecosystem over the years following a closing.

Nvidia says Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the AI ecosystem.

Nvidia founder, president and CEO Jensen Huang said Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the AI ecosystem. He said it will support open-source and open-weight models from every model builder, and retain multi-cloud and multi-accelerator development and deployment, allowing builders to use the hardware and infrastructure that best fit their work.

Huang also cited an open letter on open weights that he signed with executives and researchers from across the industry, including people from Hugging Face. The letter argued that open-weight models broaden access to AI, strengthen competition and give developers control over model deployment and adaptation. Nvidia has separately expanded its own open-weight work through Nemotron models and efforts to make frontier-class models easier to run locally.

Hugging Face says more resources are needed to keep open-source AI competitive.

Hugging Face co-founder and CEO Clément Delangue said open-source AI was at an inflection point ten years after Hugging Face began. In a LinkedIn post, he wrote that the community had shown open source can complement, and even serve as an alternative to, closed-source APIs. He said the approach would need more compute, support, collaboration and visibility to operate at larger scale.

Delangue said Nvidia had committed to backing Hugging Face while keeping the platform open, independent and compute-agnostic. He also said the founders and existing team would stay. His stated goal was to help 100 million AI builders own their intelligence rather than rent it, and to make open source the default way to build AI.

Nvidia's SEC filing repeats support for other silicon vendors.

Nvidia's filing states that Hugging Face would continue to permit model makers, developers and users to upload and download models and datasets of their choosing. It also says the platform would support other silicon vendors. Hugging Face maintains integrations spanning AWS Trainium and Inferentia, Google TPUs, Intel Gaudi, AMD Instinct and other accelerators.

Microsoft's 2018 acquisition of GitHub for $7.5 billion is a historical comparison for the deal. Microsoft said GitHub would remain independent and open, and the service largely retained that status. Its later use of public GitHub code to help train the proprietary paid Copilot service, however, prompted criticism among portions of the open-source community.

The $12,930,300,000 reference. The exact purchase price carries an internal reference. Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf noted that 129303 is the decimal Unicode value associated with the hugging-face emoji, while #129303 is a green color code that nods to Nvidia's branding. The acquisition has not closed and remains subject to the stated approvals and conditions.