Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has confirmed that the chipmaker has agreed to acquire Hugging Face, the widely used open-source AI model repository, in a deal valued at $12,930,300,000 ( approximately Rs. 12,47,774 crore). Huang made the announcement through an official post, describing the move as an effort to scale Hugging Face's platform and expand access to AI for developers and institutions globally.
What Hugging Face does?
Hugging Face has, over roughly a decade, grown into one of the most active hubs for the open-source AI community. Founded by Clem Delangue, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf, the platform hosts more than 3 million AI models, over 500,000 datasets, and around 1 million applications, and is used by upwards of 18 million developers, researchers and creators. Huang's post noted that more than 200,000 companies rely on Hugging Face to discover, evaluate, customise and deploy AI systems, making it a central meeting point for open-weight model builders across the industry.
NVIDIA says platform will stay open
According to Huang, Hugging Face will continue to operate as an open, multi-cloud and multi-accelerator platform even after the acquisition. Developers, he said, will retain the freedom to pick the models, frameworks, cloud providers, inference services and computing hardware of their choice, and NVIDIA compute will not be a requirement for building on or deploying through the platform. He added that the site would keep supporting open-source and open-weight models from every model builder in the ecosystem, not just NVIDIA's own releases.
Huang frames the deal around open weights
Huang tied the acquisition to a broader argument he has been making about open-weight AI. He referenced a recent open letter he co-authored with other industry leaders on the importance of open weights, arguing that they distribute AI leadership across companies, institutions and communities rather than concentrating it. In his post, he said open models let startups, universities, businesses and public institutions build on advanced AI capabilities without training systems from scratch, and that this is what allows AI to reach sectors such as manufacturing, healthcare, agriculture and education.
Huang also pointed to NVIDIA's existing contributions to Hugging Face as context for the deal, stating that NVIDIA is currently the platform's largest contributor of open models and data, having released more than 500 models and over 250 open datasets on it. He said this reflected a multi-year commitment to open-source AI tooling rather than a new direction prompted by the acquisition.
How the deal came together
Huang said Hugging Face co-founder Clem Delangue approached him while weighing the 'next chapter' for the company, and concluded that NVIDIA would be a suitable home for Hugging Face, its community, and the broader future of open models. Per Huang, the Hugging Face team will continue operating under its existing brand, now backed by NVIDIA's infrastructure, engineering resources and global reach. which he said would help improve the platform's reliability, safety, model evaluation, and inference and deployment capabilities.
