NVIDIA Acquires Hugging Face for $12.9 Billion to Keep AI Platform Open

NVIDIA Corp. has announced its acquisition of Hugging Face Inc., an open platform for AI developers, for $12.9 billion. The deal positions NVIDIA to expand its AI and robotics development ecosystem while maintaining Hugging Face's open-source accessibility for the global developer community.

Founded in 2016, Hugging Face provides an open platform that has become a cornerstone for AI model sharing, training, and deployment. The company's open-source libraries, including LeRobot for robotics, have gained significant traction among researchers and developers worldwide.

Clément Delangue, co-founder and CEO of Hugging Face, stated:

"Ten years after starting Hugging Face, open-source AI is at an inflection point. Thanks to the community, we've shown that it can be a complement, and even an alternative, to closed-source APIs. But for it to happen at larger scale, it needs more compute, more support, more collaboration and more visibility. That's why we went to talk to Jensen, who offered to do exactly that with us."

The acquisition follows growing collaboration between the two companies. In May 2026, Hugging Face launched an agentic AI toolkit for its Reachy Mini desktop platform. In July, the company and NVIDIA added Isaac GR00T 1.7 and the NVIDIA Isaac Teleop framework to the LeRobot open-source library for training, running, and sharing robot datasets.

Following a July 2026 cybersecurity incident in which OpenAI agents coordinated an attack on Hugging Face, the companies worked together to strengthen safeguards. Delangue noted that an NVIDIA version of a Chinese model helped Hugging Face address the incident.

Delangue added:

"We couldn't defend ourselves with proprietary closed-source APIs, so we had to use open models to defend ourselves. So, it did show the importance of open-source."

Hugging Face passed 1 million datasets last month, with open models from Chinese labs surpassing U.S. labs in performance. The company also reported NVIDIA and AMD as leaders in publishing new open models. Delangue confirmed multiple acquisition offers were received but declined to identify other bidders, stating the founding team expects to remain after the acquisition closes.