Summary
On September 2, 2026, NVIDIA signed a definitive agreement to acquire Hugging Face for approximately $13B — about $11.9B to stockholders plus a ~$1B equity retention program — with an expected close in the first half of 2027. NVIDIA has committed to keep the Hugging Face platform open and consistent with its existing practices. It is NVIDIA's second-largest acquisition on record, behind the $20B Groq-asset deal from December.
What changed
NVIDIA and Hugging Face announced a signed definitive agreement to acquire Hugging Face for ~$13B in total consideration (an ~$11.9B cash purchase price to stockholders plus up to ~$1B in equity-based retention for Hugging Face employees joining NVIDIA), pending regulatory approvals and expected to close in H1 2027. NVIDIA plans to keep Hugging Face's hub open-source and its existing model, dataset, and application-sharing practices intact.
Why it matters
Hugging Face is the effective default registry for open-source models, datasets, and inference endpoints; bringing it under NVIDIA aligns the open ecosystem's discovery layer with the hardware vendor that ships most of its training and inference silicon. The commitment to keep the hub open blunts the antitrust story but still hands NVIDIA a direct line to every open-weights release and every serverless inference endpoint the community depends on — a defensive moat against AMD, Google TPUs, and hyperscaler custom silicon, and a distribution lever over every model provider that depends on Hugging Face for reach.
Evidence excerpt
On September 2, 2026, NVIDIA Corporation entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Hugging Face, Inc.... The acquisition structure includes an approximately $11.9 billion purchase price payable to Hugging Face stockholders, subject to certain adjustments, and an equity-based retention program of up to approximately $1.0 billion for Hugging Face employees joining NVIDIA. The transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2027, subject to the satisfaction or waiver of customary closing conditions... NVIDIA said it will keep Hugging Face's platform open and consistent with the startup's existing practices.