Nvidia has agreed to buy AI platform Hugging Face for about $12.9 billion (£9.5 billion), marking one of the chipmaker’s largest acquisitions as it moves further into software.
Founded in 2016, Hugging Face has become a go‑to hub where developers and researchers can find, share and test AI models and tools. It hosts more than 18 million developers, over three million AI models and is used by more than 200 000 companies.
The deal will integrate Hugging Face’s open‑source community into Nvidia’s ecosystem, giving the company control of a platform that rivals OpenAI and Anthropic. Nvidia said the platform would remain open to developers and users would not be required to use Nvidia chips or services.
Under the agreement, Nvidia will pay about $11.9 billion to Hugging Face investors and offer up to $1 billion in stock‑based incentives to employees who join the company. The acquisition could help Nvidia expand its presence in AI software as major clients such as Microsoft, Meta and OpenAI develop their own chips.
Supporters of the move argue it will encourage competition by making AI tools more widely available to start‑ups and smaller companies. “It’s a vote of confidence in open AI,” said Yaël Ossowski, deputy director of the Consumer Choice Center.
Hugging Face was founded by French entrepreneurs Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf and is backed by investors including Amazon, AMD and Intel. Nvidia shares rose just under 1.5 % at 17:30 BST following the announcement.
