NVIDIA said Thursday, Sept. 3, 2026, it has agreed to acquire open-model hub Hugging Face for $12,930,300,000 — a cash figure CEO Jensen Huang put on the company’s blog after weeks of deal rumors.

Hugging Face is the default front door for open-weight AI: Huang’s post says more than 18 million developers, researchers, and creators use it to share more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets, and 1 million applications, with more than 200,000 companies discovering, evaluating, customizing, and deploying models there.

The political and competitive question is whether the biggest GPU vendor can own that marketplace without turning it into a captive sales channel. Huang addressed that head-on: “Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem. 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.”

He also said the hub will keep hosting open-source and open-weight models from every builder and stay multi-cloud and multi-accelerator. NVIDIA already bills itself as Hugging Face’s largest open-model contributor — more than 500 models and 250 open datasets on the platform, per Huang’s post.

TechCrunch reported Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue framed the sale as scale, not a pivot away from open alternatives: the company needed “more compute, more support, more collaboration, and more visibility,” and Jensen “offered to do exactly that with us.” TechCrunch also noted Hugging Face has raised over $395 million to date (last round $235 million in 2023, with Salesforce Ventures leading and Google, Amazon, IBM, and NVIDIA among investors), and that The Information recently put annualized revenue around $150 million.

The Decoder’s write-up of the SEC filing says the purchase price is roughly $11.9 billion plus a stock program of up to $1 billion to retain staff, with closing targeted for the first half of 2027 pending regulatory approval — so antitrust and foreign-investment reviewers still get a say before the Hub’s keys formally change hands.

For builders, the immediate fact is simpler than the deal math: the company that makes most of the world’s AI training GPUs just bought the main distribution hub for open models, while promising in writing that its chips will not become a toll booth. Dated Thursday, Sept. 3, 2026 — the open question is whether that promise survives the lawyers, the regulators, and the next product roadmap.

Sources