What happened
- On September 3, 2026, Nvidia confirmed the purchase of Hugging Face for $12,930,300,000, according to the announcement signed by Jensen Huang on the company’s blog.
- The acquired platform hosts more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets and 1 million applications, with 18 million registered developers and 200,000 user companies.
- Huang wrote that Hugging Face will remain an open platform and that using Nvidia compute won’t be required to build or deploy there.
- It’s Nvidia’s second-largest deal, behind the $20 billion paid for Groq assets in December 2025.
Why it matters
- Any team in Chile building products on open models (classifiers, transcription, customer service assistants) downloads those files from a repository that now belongs to whoever sells the cards they run on.
- Neutrality was declared in a blog post, not in a public contractual commitment. Nobody outside the two companies can audit what happens if that statement changes in two years.
- For a small business that chose open models precisely to avoid depending on a single vendor, the decision is back on the table: it’s worth keeping your own copy of the files in production and not just the download link.
The number
$12,930,300,000. The amount Nvidia published, down to the last digit.
Context
Hugging Face had turned down a $500 million offer from Nvidia in 2025, according to the Financial Times. Eighteen months later the price multiplied by 25. In that interval the platform was the target of an intrusion documented as the first public case of models autonomously carrying out a multi-stage attack against a third party, the same kind of capability OpenAI now restricts in its Astra model.
What’s next
- The deal is subject to the usual regulatory reviews. Neither company published an estimated closing date.
- Nvidia didn’t detail whether there will be changes to terms of use, free storage limits or API access.
Bottom line
In August, Nvidia had committed $6 billion to Poolside to develop open models, according to The Wall Street Journal. The company that makes the hardware has spent a year also buying what runs on top of it.
Sources
- NVIDIA to Acquire Hugging Face — Nvidia corporate blog, September 3, 2026
- Nvidia confirms it will buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion — TechCrunch
Edited by Rodrigo Cornejo. How we select and verify the facts, in who writes.
