NVIDIA and Hugging Face have collaborated on AI and robotics development. Source: NVIDIA
After a few weeks of anticipation, NVIDIA Corp. today said it is acquiring Hugging Face Inc., an open platform for AI developers, for $12.9 billion. Founded in 2016, Hugging Face provides an open platform for AI developers.
“Ten years after starting Hugging Face, open-source AI is at an inflection point,” Clément Delangue, co-founder and CEO of Hugging Face,posted on X. “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.”
In May 2026, Brooklyn, N.Y.-based Hugging Facelaunchedan agenticAItoolkit for its Reachy Mini desktop platform. In July, thecompanyand NVIDIAaddedIsaac GR00T 1.7 and the NVIDIA Isaac Teleop framework to the LeRobotopen-sourcelibrary for training, running, and sharing robot datasets, models, policies, and workflows.
Also in July, AI agents in anOpenAIcybersecurityexperiment coordinatedan attackon Hugging Face. Since then, the companies haveworked togetherto strengthen safeguards, and Delangue noted that an NVIDIA version of a Chinese model helped Hugging Face address the incident.
“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,” hetoldCNBC.
When it announced passing 1 million datasets last month, Hugging Facenotedthat open models fromChineselabs had surpassed those of U.S. labs in terms of size and performance. The company also said that NVIDIA andAMDwere the leaders in publishing the most new open models and that attention and usage are not the same.
Hugging Face received multiple acquisition offers, but Delangue declined to identify other bidders. The company’s founding team said it expects to stay after the acquisition.
Frontier models from China have surpassed U.S. models in parameters. Source: Hugging Face.
“Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem,” stated Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA. “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.”
“Hugging Face will continue to support open-source and open-weight models from across the ecosystem, from every model builder,”wroteHuang. “It will continue to support multi-cloud and multi-accelerator development and deployment, so builders can use the hardware and infrastructure that best fit their work.”
NVIDIA remains committed to open-source platforms to broaden access to advanced AI across research institutions and businesses, according to Huang. “That is how AI can advance safely, strengthen cybersecurity and sovereignty, accelerate innovation, and reach factories, hospitals, farms, classrooms and Main Street businesses around the world,” he said.