NVIDIA plans to acquire Hugging Face and keep AI development platform open

NVIDIA and Hugging Face have collaborated on AI and robotics development. 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 Face launched an agentic AI toolkit for its Reachy Mini desktop platform. In July, the company and NVIDIA added Isaac GR00T 1.7 and the NVIDIA Isaac Teleop framework to the LeRobot open-source library for training, running, and sharing robot datasets, models, policies, and workflows. Also in July, AI agents in an OpenAI cybersecurity experiment coordinated an attack on Hugging Face. Since then, the companies have worked together to 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,” he told CNBC. Hugging Face’s founding team said it expects to stay after the acquisition. When it announced passing 1 million datasets last month, Hugging Face noted that open models from Chinese labs had surpassed those of U.S. labs in terms of size and performance. The company also said that NVIDIA and AMD were the leaders in publishing the most new open models and that attention and usage are not the same. Frontier models from China have surpassed U.S.