NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang announced acquisition of Hugging Face, a popular open-source platform for AI and Machine Learning for $12.93 billion on Wednesday.
According to Huang, the acquisition aims to scale Hugging Face’s platform, infrastructure and expand access to AI to its community of over 18 million developers, researchers and creators.
“Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem. Developers will choose the models they want, the frameworks they want, the clouds and inference service providers they want and the computing platforms they want. NVIDIA compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face,” clarified Huang.
Exciting day for NVIDIA and @huggingface.
Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty. They allow every developer, startup, university, industry and country to build with, customize and benefit from AI.
Thank you…
— Jensen Huang (@JensenHuang) September 3, 2026
Jensen welcomed Hugging Face co-founder Clement Delangue to NVIDIA adding that the platform could serve the global AI community at an “unprecedented scale.”
“NVIDIA’s infrastructure, engineering and global reach can help improve platform reliability, safety, model evaluation, inference and deployment capabilities, while preserving the open ecosystem that made Hugging Face foundational,” said Huang.
Meanwhile, Hugging Face co-founder Clement Delangue shared a screenshot of the acquisition announcement video meet he had with Huang on Wednesday.
“Super happy to share our intention to join forces with NVIDIA in a $12,930,300,000 acquisition. 10 years after starting Hugging Face, open-source AI is at an inflection point. Thanks to the community, we’ve shown that it can be a complement, and even an alternative, to closed-source APIs. But for it to happen at larger scale, it needs more compute, more support, more collaboration and more visibility. That’s why we went to talk to Jensen, who offered to do exactly that with us,” wrote Delangue.
Super happy to share our intention to join forces with NVIDIA in a $12,930,300,000 acquisition 💛💚
10 years after starting Hugging Face, open-source AI is at an inflection point. Thanks to the community, we’ve shown that it can be a complement, and even an alternative, to… pic.twitter.com/WgFf0bKgwf
— clem 🤗 (@ClementDelangue) September 3, 2026
With the acquisition, Huang also advocated for open-source AI models, especially in the wake of increasingly capable frontier AI models.
“Open models let startups, businesses, universities and public institutions build on advanced capabilities without training every model from scratch. They enable organizations to match the right model to the right job. That is how AI can advance safely, strengthen cybersecurity and sovereignty, accelerate innovation, and reach factories, hospitals, farms, classrooms and Main Street businesses around the world,” added Huang.
Also Read: Explained: How NVIDIA Became the Company Every AI Model Depends On
