Nvidia Just Bought the AI Platform That 18 Million Developers Rely On

If you've built anything with AI in the last few years, there's a good chance you've touched Hugging Face without necessarily thinking about who runs it. It's the platform where more than 18 million developers, researchers, and hobbyists go to share and download AI models — over 3 million of them — and where more than 200,000 companies go to find the ones they need.

As of today, Nvidia owns it.

Nvidia is paying close to $12.93 billion for Hugging Face, confirmed Thursday. It's the chipmaker's second-biggest acquisition on record, behind only its $20 billion purchase of assets from Groq this past December.

Nvidia's business has always been about being the layer nobody can build AI without — the hardware underneath everything. Hugging Face is a different kind of essential: it's the layer where the actual AI models live, get shared, and get deployed, largely independent of what hardware they end up running on.

Buying it gives Nvidia a foothold in that layer too, and access to a direct relationship with millions of developers who may never buy a single Nvidia chip themselves — but whose choices about which models to use, and how, shape where the rest of the industry's hardware demand ends up.

Nvidia says it plans to keep Hugging Face's platform open, consistent with how it's always operated — a notable commitment, given how much scrutiny any big acquisition of open infrastructure draws from a developer community that tends to be wary of corporate ownership changing the terms.

Coverage of the acquisition has repeatedly circled back to one detail: Hugging Face is the same AI startup that was previously hacked into by OpenAI — a strange footnote for a company about to become part of Nvidia's empire, and a reminder of just how tightly connected, and occasionally adversarial, the small circle of major AI players actually is.

The deal is expected to close in the first half of 2027, pending regulatory approval.