Nvidia Just Spent $13 Billion to Keep an AI Platform From Becoming Nvidia's

Nvidia has bought companies before. It rarely makes them a Valentine.

On September 3, 2026, Nvidia confirmed it is acquiring Hugging Face — the open-source platform that has become the default home for AI models, datasets, and tools — for $12.93 billion. It's Nvidia's second-biggest acquisition ever, behind only the $20 billion it paid for Groq's assets at the end of last year.

If you've never heard of it, you've almost certainly used something built on it. More than 18 million developers, researchers, and hobbyists use Hugging Face to share and download AI models — over 3 million of them, alongside 500,000 datasets and a million applications. More than 200,000 companies use the platform to find, test, and deploy AI systems. It's less a single product than the plumbing a huge share of the AI industry runs on.

The $12.93 billion is structured as roughly $11.9 billion in cash, plus up to $1 billion in equity retention meant to keep Hugging Face's own staff around after the sale. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has been explicit about what he isn't planning to change: he said Hugging Face "will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem," and that "Nvidia compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face."

It's a strange instinct for a hardware company to spend nearly $13 billion protecting a platform's independence rather than folding it into its own walled garden. But Nvidia's business is selling the chips that both open and closed AI models run on — and Hugging Face is where a huge share of the open side of that world already lives. Owning the neutral ground, rather than competing with it, keeps Nvidia positioned no matter which models win.

The deal still has to close, and regulators in multiple jurisdictions will look closely at a chip giant buying the platform so much of the AI industry depends on to distribute its work. For now, Hugging Face's 18 million users keep uploading and downloading models exactly as before — just with Nvidia's balance sheet now standing behind the platform underneath them.