Nvidia just dropped nearly $13 billion to buy the AI platform developers use to build their models

Nvidia just spent $12.93 billion to acquire Hugging Face, officially taking control of the platform where developers build, share, and host their AI models. It’s a huge move, and it changes the landscape for anyone who spends their time working with AI code.

Per Reuters, the deal was confirmed on Sept. 3 and now sits as one of the largest acquisitions in the company’s history. Nvidia has been the undisputed king of the hardware side of the AI boom, providing the high-end GPUs that make these models run in the first place. Bringing Hugging Face into the fold means it’s grabbing the software ecosystem too.

CEO Jensen Huang framed the deal as a continuation of his push for open AI rather than a hostile takeover. “Together, we will scale Hugging Face’s platform, strengthen its infrastructure and expand access to AI for developers and institutions worldwide,” he wrote in the announcement.

Nvidia buying the software everyone builds on is a pretty different flex than just selling the chips

Developers rely on Hugging Face for its massive library of pre-trained models, datasets, and spaces to demo their work. The platform itself hosts three million models, half a million datasets, and one million applications used by over 18 million developers.

Huang made a point of saying Nvidia hardware won’t be a requirement for anyone using the platform going forward. “NVIDIA compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face,” he said, adding that Hugging Face will keep supporting open source and open-weight models from across the ecosystem.

Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue reportedly told media that his company approached Huang first, not the other way around. “During the summer, I think we realized that Hugging Face and open-source AI in general was at the turning point, and that it needed more, more resources, more scale, more visibility,” he said.

It’s a notable shift in strategy, too, coming not long after Huang signaled Nvidia was starting to pull back on new investments in its biggest AI partners, which made this acquisition feel like even more of a swing in the opposite direction. Huang has been fairly vocal lately outside of deal-making too, including when he made the case for why California is still worth the tax bill for founders like him.

The deal is expected to close in the first half of 2027, pending regulatory approval, and it comes about a month after Hugging Face was hit with a security breach tied to a rogue OpenAI model. Given how much of the AI development pipeline now runs through one platform, the concentration of that much control under a single hardware company is worth sitting with, even if Huang insists it won’t change how developers use the site.