Nvidia has agreed to buy open-source artificial intelligence platform Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, marking the chipmaker's biggest expansion beyond hardware and into the software layer of the AI industry.
The deal was reported by CNBC on Thursday. Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue told CNBC that his company made the first move. "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 said in an appearance on Squawk Box. He said he approached Nvidia because it was "a perfect home" for the company, and that "a few weeks later, here we are."
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang confirmed the deal in a blog post Thursday. "Together, we will scale Hugging Face's platform, strengthen its infrastructure and expand access to AI for developers and institutions worldwide," Huang wrote. He also said Hugging Face will "remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem."
The acquisition is the second largest in Nvidia's history. It follows the company's $20 billion purchase of assets from chipmaker Groq in December 2025. Before that, Nvidia's biggest deal was its $7 billion acquisition of Israeli chipmaker Mellanox in 2019. Nvidia has become the world's most valuable company in large part because of demand for its graphics processing units, which have powered the generative AI boom.
MarketWatch reported that the deal gives Nvidia access to what analysts described as one of the most important parcels of real estate in the AI market, and that it will promote open-source technology more broadly across the industry.
The deal comes after Hugging Face was at the center of a recent hacking incident. Delangue acknowledged the breach on Thursday but said it proved the case for open models. He said his company used an Nvidia version of a Chinese open model to resolve the attack, and that the incident showed the need to double down on the proliferation of open source AI.
Huang echoed that view, framing open-source development as a security asset rather than a liability. "When I say asymmetric capability, there are way more people who are protecting than there are people who are attacking," he said. "And so, the benefit of having the community come together with open models, so that they can collaborate all transparently with each other, gives the defenders an asymmetric advantage."
The deal had been anticipated after The Information reported on it last week. It has not yet cleared regulatory review.
