DOJ Scrutiny Puts Nvidia’s $13 Billion Hugging Face Bet Under Pressure
DOJ Scrutiny Puts Nvidia’s $13 Billion Hugging Face Bet Under Pressure
Nvidia announced its nearly $13 billion plan to acquire Hugging Face in September, pitching the takeover as a major expansion beyond the AI chips that have made it the industry’s dominant supplier. Chief executive Jensen Huang said the deal would help “expand access to AI for developers and institutions worldwide.”
That promise carries particular weight because Hugging Face is not a niche asset. The open-source platform hosts and tests AI models, while also selling infrastructure and collaboration tools to organisations working on proprietary AI. At the time of the announcement, Nvidia said more than 18 million people and 200,000 companies used the service to share at least 3 million models and 500,000 datasets.
Now the U.S. Department of Justice is examining the proposed purchase. Reuters reported that the department had “made inquiries” into the roughly $13 billion transaction, including how it could affect competition in the AI industry. CNBC separately confirmed the inquiry through a person familiar with the matter.
The review sharpens a central tension around Nvidia’s dealmaking: the company says owning Hugging Face would widen the availability of AI tools, while regulators appear concerned that a firm already central to AI computing could gain greater influence over how models are distributed, tested and commercialised.
It is not an isolated headache. Nvidia is also reportedly facing DOJ scrutiny over its AI-chip dominance, and its earlier $20 billion purchase of Groq assets has drawn attention as well. Nvidia declined to comment on the Hugging Face inquiry. The DOJ review is not, on its own, a finding of wrongdoing—but it places the company’s second-largest acquisition under a harder competitive microscope.
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