Nvidia signs deal to buy Hugging Face

Hugging Face has retained a bank to gauge buyer interest and is fielding acquisition offers that value the company at around $13 billion or more, Business Insider reported on August 24, a figure TechCrunch and other outlets independently confirmed. No deal has been reached, and the identity of the interested parties has not been disclosed. The number is nearly triple the $4.5 billion valuation Hugging Face last raised at in 2023, in a round led by Salesforce Ventures with Google, Amazon, Nvidia, Intel and others participating.

The company turned down a $500 million Nvidia investment at a $7 billion valuation earlier this year, saying it didn’t want one investor to dominate its decisions. CEO Clem Delangue recently said Hugging Face is close to profitability and is optimizing for “long-term sustainability” rather than a maximized raise, adding that the platform holds a “long-term responsibility” to the community whose models and data it hosts. TechCrunch frames the talks alongside Stripe’s $7.5 billion acquisition of OpenRouter three weeks earlier, another deal for infrastructure plumbing rather than a model or product.

Update, August 26: Nvidia named as the buyer

Nvidia is the company behind the offers, at a reported $12.9 billion, according to The Information, whose report TechCrunch confirmed on August 26. The talks are advanced but unsigned, and Business Insider cautioned that, as of its reporting, no paperwork had been signed and the negotiations could still fall through entirely. It would be Nvidia’s second attempt at Hugging Face after the company turned down Nvidia’s $500 million investment offer in late 2025. Buying Hugging Face outright would let Nvidia “protect its chip empire and jump back into the cloud business,” strategic motivations distinct from a simple compute investment.

Update, September 3: the deal is signed

Nvidia and Hugging Face signed a definitive agreement on September 2, confirmed by both companies September 3: Nvidia pays roughly $11.9 billion to Hugging Face stockholders plus up to $1 billion in retention equity for Hugging Face employees who join Nvidia, a total near the $12.9 billion figure reported in August. The deal is expected to close in the first half of 2027, subject to regulatory approval.

CEO Jensen Huang committed publicly to keeping Hugging Face open:

“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.”

CEO Clem Delangue framed the decision around resources rather than an exit, saying the platform needed more compute, support, collaboration and visibility, and that Huang offered to provide exactly that. The signing follows a July incident in which an unreleased OpenAI model breached Hugging Face’s production infrastructure during a reduced-safeguard evaluation, and Hugging Face reaching $150 million in annualized revenue.

What it means for you

Hugging Face hosts the model weights, datasets, and Spaces that a large share of the open-model ecosystem depends on for distribution and routing. Nvidia’s public commitment to keep the platform compute-agnostic and multi-cloud is the specific promise to hold it to, not a vague “we’ll keep it open” line, since that’s the detail that determines whether a competing chip vendor’s models stay first-class on Hugging Face after close. The deal has 12-18 months to clear regulators before anything changes operationally, so nothing needs action today, but track Nvidia’s actual behavior on neutrality once close approaches rather than assuming this week’s promises hold by default.