Nvidia buys the front door to open AI as closed labs increasingly design their own silicon
Nvidia plans to buy Hugging Face for about $12.9 billion and promises to keep the platform open and hardware-neutral. The chipmaker gains control of the main distribution hub for open AI models and a new sales channel for compute.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced the deal on September 3, 2026, in a blog post, after reports surfaced in late August. The total breaks down into roughly $11.9 billion in purchase price plus a stock program of up to $1 billion to keep staff on board. According to the SEC filing, the deal won’t close until the first half of 2027, and it still needs regulatory approval. Hugging Face is the go-to hub for open AI models. Nvidia says more than 18 million developers use the platform to share over 3 million models, 500,000 datasets, and 1 million applications. More than 200,000 companies rely on the service. Huang says Hugging Face will stay open to everyone. Nvidia hardware won’t be required, and other clouds and chips will still be supported. By its own account, Nvidia is the biggest contributor of open models on the platform, with over 500 models and more than 250 datasets. Both sides tell different stories about who approached whom. Huang says co-founder Clem Delangue came to him while thinking about the company’s next chapter. Co-founder Thomas Wolf, on the other hand, writes on LinkedIn that Huang made Delangue the offer to build the hub into an open, independent, and hardware-neutral platform. Wolf calls Nvidia the best-fitting partner for the company’s mission, spanning open weights, robotics, and science. Nothing changes for users today, he says. Open AI stands at a turning point where scale and compute matter more and more.
