Nvidia’s $13 Billion Hugging Face Deal Tests Its Promise to Keep AI Open

Nvidia’s $13 Billion Hugging Face Deal Tests Its Promise to Keep AI Open
Weeks after Hugging Face approached Nvidia about a deal, chief executive Clément Delangue said the platform and open-source AI had reached a “turning point” requiring more resources, scale and visibility. Nvidia moved quickly, announcing Thursday that it would buy the New York-based company for $12.93 billion—its second-largest acquisition on record.

The deal brings a hub used by more than 18 million developers, hosting more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets and 1 million applications, under the ownership of the company whose processors underpin much of the AI boom. Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang’s central pledge is that Hugging Face will remain open: users may choose their models, clouds, frameworks and computing platforms, and “NVIDIA compute will not be required” to build or deploy through the service.

Delangue has cast that promise as an expansion rather than a retreat from the project’s roots. In announcing the tie-up, he said open-source AI had proved it could be “a complement, and even an alternative” to closed systems, but required greater support to grow. Google CEO Sundar Pichai, whose company was already an investor and partner, similarly said the transaction would “strengthen the open model ecosystem.”

Yet the acquisition also exposes the tension beneath the celebration. Hugging Face, often described as AI’s GitHub, occupies a strategic chokepoint as open models challenge proprietary offerings from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. Analysts say Nvidia is paying not for roughly $150 million in annualized revenue but for that position at the center of the ecosystem; Dan Ives called it a scarce asset, while the transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2027.

Others are blunter. Gil Luria of D.A. Davidson described the purchase as a “defensive move,” arguing that ownership of such an important repository can put rivals at a disadvantage. The immediate question is whether Nvidia’s neutrality pledge reassures competing chip and cloud providers—or whether control of open AI’s busiest marketplace ultimately strengthens the company that already dominates its hardware.

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