Nvidia Has Announced Acquisition of Hugging Face
The $12.93 billion deal merges a leading hardware supplier with the open-source machine learning platform.
Updated on Sept. 27, 2026 in Artificial Intelligence
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Nvidia announced an acquisition of the machine learning platform Hugging Face for $12.93 billion. The deal includes $11.9 billion for company stockholders and a $1 billion equity-based retention program.
Why it matters
The acquisition integrates Hugging Face's open-source artificial intelligence ecosystem directly into the hardware and software stack of a major compute manufacturer. This marks a strategic shift in the consolidation of AI infrastructure layers.
Nvidia allocated $11.9 billion to stockholders and $1 billion for employee retention out of a total $12.93 billion valuation. This follows a trajectory of funding rounds that grew from $4 million in 2018 to a $100 million Series C raise in 2022.
The players
Nvidia
A dominant manufacturer of graphics processing units that power the hardware infrastructure for global artificial intelligence training.
Hugging Face
An open-source artificial intelligence platform that provides tools, datasets, and a hub for developers to share machine learning models.
Kevin Durant
A professional basketball player who invested in Hugging Face through his investment firm, Thirty Five Ventures.
The details
Founded in 2016, Hugging Face initially operated as a chatbot platform before pivoting to a centralized hub for open source artificial intelligence and machine learning models. The company provides infrastructure for hosting datasets and model weights, which developers use to build predictive algorithms. The acquisition by Nvidia brings this software distribution layer under the same corporate umbrella as its specialized graphics processing units, which are the industry standard for training large-scale neural networks.
Timeline
2016: Hugging Face was founded.
2018: The company secured $4 million in seed funding.
December 2019: Hugging Face raised $15 million in a Series A round.
May 2022: The company raised $100 million in Series C funding.
The Tech Race
This acquisition moves beyond the $2 billion valuation milestone established during the 2022 Series C funding round. It marks a significant consolidation of the AI software ecosystem into the hardware manufacturer's vertically integrated stack.
Developers relying on the open-source platform should monitor for future changes to service terms or repository access policies under the new ownership. Financial outcomes for early backers include projected returns exceeding 240-fold for investors like Kevin Durant.
The takeaway
The acquisition solidifies the trend of hardware giants absorbing key software infrastructure layers. Interested parties should watch for the next regulatory filing regarding the deal's closing terms.
Further reading
For broader trends in the industry, visit Artificial Intelligence.
Source note: This article includes information reported by Economic Times.
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