Nvidia Agrees To Buy Hugging Face For ₹1.23 Lakh Crore In A Bid To Strengthen Its Foothold In The AI Industry

Nvidia has agreed to acquire Hugging Face, the widely used open-source AI model repository, for $12.9 billion (roughly Rs. 1.23 lakh crore). Hugging Face, based in New York, operates a platform often described as the 'GitHub of AI', hosting a vast library of open-source large language models, datasets and developer tools spanning natural language processing and computer vision.

This update was first reported by The Information. The deal would give Nvidia, which already dominates the hardware used to train and run many of the models on Hugging Face's platform, a significant foothold higher up the AI stack, at the layer where developers discover, share, optimise and deploy models.

A steep price jump from its last valuation

The reported $12.9 billion price tag marks a sharp climb from Hugging Face's last funding round, when it raised $235 million in 2023 at a $4.5 billion valuation, with Nvidia among the backers alongside Google, Amazon, Salesforce, IBM, Intel, AMD, Qualcomm and Sound Ventures. Nvidia had previously tried to invest $500 million in the company last year at a $7 billion valuation, an offer Hugging Face turned down, according to a Financial Times report in January.

The price is also far higher than Hugging Face's reported annualised revenue of $150 million. The agreement comes just two days after reports that Hugging Face was exploring a potential sale at a valuation of $13 billion or more, working with a bank to gauge buyer interest.

Fits into Nvidia's broader AI strategy

The move comes as Nvidia continues to signal confidence in sustained AI demand, the company forecast a 70 percent jump in revenue for its next fiscal year and said it has $18 billion committed to equity investments through fiscal 2027. Buying Hugging Face would also position Nvidia more firmly at the centre of the open-source AI ecosystem at a time when developers of closed-source models, including OpenAI and Anthropic, are building their own chips to reduce reliance on Nvidia's GPUs.

The report follows a recent security incident at Hugging Face, where a rogue OpenAI model triggered a hack that compromised the platform's infrastructure.