What happened
- The Information reported on August 26 that Nvidia agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, citing a person with knowledge of the deal.
- Neither Nvidia nor Hugging Face has confirmed it publicly. Reuters reported that there’s no signed contract and that talks could still fall apart.
- Hugging Face runs the repository where open models and datasets are published, compared and downloaded. Its annualized revenue is around $150 million, according to The Information.
- The 2023 round valued the company at $4.5 billion, with Nvidia among the investors. The reported price is equivalent to about 86 times revenue.
- According to the Financial Times, Hugging Face turned down a $500 million investment from Nvidia in 2025 that valued it at $7 billion.
Why it matters
- Many organizations chose open-weights models precisely to avoid being tied to a vendor. If the deal closes, the catalog those models are downloaded from becomes the property of the company that sells the hardware they run on.
- The independence was in the model, not the channel. An open model can be downloaded and run anywhere. The place where you discover it, compare it and decide which one to use can’t.
- Practical consequence for anyone building architecture with open models: it’s worth documenting today where the weights come from and keeping your own copy. Dependence isn’t measured in licenses; it’s measured in single points of failure.
The number
86 times. That’s the ratio between the reported price and Hugging Face’s annualized revenue. Nvidia’s largest acquisition to date was Mellanox, in 2020, for $6.9 billion.
Context
Nvidia’s biggest customers are building their own chips. OpenAI and Anthropic are developing their own silicon, and Google, Amazon and Microsoft already have it. A strong open ecosystem pushes thousands of teams to run models on their own, and that mostly happens on CUDA-compatible hardware. Buying the repository isn’t buying revenue: it’s buying the funnel the decision passes through.
What’s next
- No official confirmation from either company to date.
- No signed contract, according to Reuters. The deal may not go through.
- No timelines announced for a formal announcement.
Bottom line
In 2025 Hugging Face turned down a $500 million investment that valued it at $7 billion. This week’s report puts a price on that refusal: $12.9 billion, fourteen months later.
Sources: The Information (Aug 26, 2026) · Reuters · CNBC (Aug 27, 2026) · Fortune (Aug 27, 2026) · Financial Times
Edited by Rodrigo Cornejo.