Nvidia Buys the Place Everyone Downloads Their Models From

Business

07 September 2026 14:49

Nvidia swallowed Hugging Face.

Nvidia announced the acquisition last week in an SEC filing and a blog post from Jensen Huang. Roughly 11.9 billion will go to owners, with up to 1 billion more in stock-based incentives.

It's Nvidia's largest acquisition, surpassing 7 billion dollar Mellanox deal in 2019, and a rounding error against a market cap near 5.5 trillion.

Hugging Face was valued at 4.5 billion in 2023 after a 235 million dollar round backed by Nvidia, Salesforce, Google and Amazon. The Financial Times reported Nvidia offered 500 million last year and was rejected. Annualized revenue currently runs around 150 million, according to reports.

What Nvidia gets

3 million models
1 million applications
500,000 datasets
18 million developers, researchers and creators
200,000 companies using it to find, evaluate, customise and deploy AI

Hugging Face is the open source model centre. Owning it puts Nvidia at the point where models get discovered and deployed, which is huge.

Nvidia scaled back its own DGX Cloud business roughly a year ago, and Hugging Face already helps developers run models on rented compute. This is a route back into cloud in a sense.

The promise

Huang stated "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."

Of course for some a chip company owning the neutral marketplace where its competitors' models are distributed is an obvious conflict, and Huang has addressed this.

Nvidia is already Hugging Face's biggest contributer, with over 500 models and 250 open datasets published there.

Delangue's reasoning

According to reports, the approach came from Hugging Face. Clement Delangue told CNBC his company went to Huang over the summer, "and a few weeks later, here we are."

"During the summer, I think we realized that Hugging Face and open-source AI in general was at the turning point, and that it needed more, more resources, more scale, more visibility."

He framed it as "There's a path where proprietary APIs are dominating the field, where everyone is kind of outsourcing their AI to them. And there's a path where open-source AI is available, and everyone can actually become an owner or builder of AI, and not just renting it or using it from other people."

Huang was one of the signatories of a July letter with 24 other companies, Hugging Face included, urging the US government to back open-weight models rather than restrict them. Delangue has separately warned that China is "clearly dominating" open source AI.

Hugging Face was founded in New York in 2016 by Delangue, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf, and the team joins Nvidia while continuing to run the platform under the same brand.

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Tags: Nvidia

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