NVIDIA has agreed to acquire Hugging Face, the world’s largest open model community platform, for $12.93 billion. The announcement was made directly by CEO Jensen Huang on the company’s blog.
This is a particularly consequential deal because Hugging Face sits at the heart of the open AI ecosystem. According to the post, more than 18 million developers, researchers, and creators use the platform to share over 3 million models, 500,000 datasets, and 1 million applications. More than 200,000 companies rely on Hugging Face to discover, evaluate, customize, and deploy AI.
The most notable point in the announcement is the pledge to keep the platform open. Jensen Huang stated that Hugging Face “will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem.” Developers will still be able to choose the models, frameworks, cloud providers, and compute platforms they prefer, with “no requirement to use NVIDIA hardware to build on or deploy through Hugging Face.” Multi-cloud and multi-accelerator support will be maintained.
He also cited an open letter on the importance of open weights that he had previously co-signed with several industry leaders, reiterating a familiar argument: open weights help AI develop more safely, enhance cybersecurity and sovereignty, and spread to every corner of the economy. NVIDIA described itself as the largest contributor of open models and data to Hugging Face, with over 500 open models and more than 250 datasets.
For NVIDIA, the acquisition places the company at the core infrastructure level of both hardware and software. For the community, the critical question is whether the “open” commitment will endure once the platform belongs to a corporation with clear interests at the hardware layer. The promise has been made; the real test lies in what comes next.