Nvidia has agreed to acquire Hugging Face, the largest platform for sharing open AI models, for about USD 12.93 billion. The deal, negotiated personally by Jensen Huang and Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue, is expected to close in the first half of 2027, subject to regulatory approval.
What Nvidia is buying
Hugging Face is where developers publish, find and test models. The figures cited by Digitalk show the scale:
- more than 18 million developers;
- around 3 million models;
- more than 200,000 companies.
Why a chipmaker is buying a software platform
Analysts see three reasons:
- Insurance. Google, Amazon, OpenAI and Anthropic are developing their own AI chips to reduce their dependence on Nvidia.
- Early visibility. Nvidia will see which models and architectures developers are adopting, which could guide the design of future chips.
- Distribution. The platform is a natural channel for Nvidia's cloud services.
Will Hugging Face stay open?
Huang and Delangue say the platform will remain open, multi-cloud and compatible with other manufacturers' chips. Analysts draw a comparison with Microsoft's 2018 acquisition of GitHub for USD 7.5 billion, after which the platform kept a degree of independence. Neutrality, however, will have to be proven over time.
There is a geopolitical angle as well. Chinese labs such as DeepSeek and Alibaba publish open models on Hugging Face and may build their own repositories if the platform comes under American control.
What it means for developers and businesses
- Open models stay in the game. Cheaper hosting for open models could put price pressure on closed APIs.
- Dependence on a single provider is a risk. If you are building a product on a specific model or platform, plan how you would switch providers.
- Licenses matter. Not every "open" model allows commercial use.
In web projects with AI features, such as site search or inquiry classification, we always design the integration so that the model can be swapped out. See our custom development and API integrations.
Topic source: Digitalk: Why Jensen Huang bought "the home of developers" (in Bulgarian). This article is an independent analysis by Penkov Studio.
