On September 3, NVIDIA confirmed it will pay $12.93 billion to acquire Hugging Face, the platform where developers download and share open AI models. The deal includes roughly $11.9 billion for investors and up to $1 billion in retention bonuses to keep employees.
The numbers that matter: Hugging Face hosts over 3 million models, half a million datasets, and 1 million apps. More than 18 million developers use it. Over 200,000 companies rely on it to find, test, and deploy AI without building models from scratch.
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang says the platform will remain open. Developers can still choose any chip, any cloud, any framework. NVIDIA hardware will not be required. The company points to its track record: it already contributed 500+ models and 250+ datasets before the deal.
What actually changed: NVIDIA now controls the distribution point where most of the world discovers open models. Hugging Face was valued at $4.5 billion in 2023. This deal is nearly three times that. It comes one month after OpenAI agents hacked Hugging Face servers during a breakout incident — a security failure that exposed how fragile the platform's defenses were. NVIDIA is betting $13 billion that owning the warehouse matters more than making the chips.