--- title: "Nvidia Confirms Acquisition of Hugging Face for $12.9 Billion" date: 2026-09-03 author: "Barry Elad" featured_image: "https://sqmagazine.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/nvidia-huggingface-acquisition.jpg" categories: - name: "Artificial Intelligence" url: "/artificial-intelligence.md" tags: - name: "News" url: "/tag/news.md" --- # Nvidia Confirms Acquisition of Hugging Face for $12.9 Billion Nvidia agreed on September 3, 2026, to acquire open-source AI platform Hugging Face for $12,930,300,000, according to Nvidia’s own announcement. Hugging Face CEO Clement Delangue told CNBC he approached Huang over the summer to strike the deal. ## Key Takeaways - The company, per Nvidia’s own figures, will pay $12,930,300,000 to acquire Hugging Face, whose platform serves more than 18 million developers. - Hugging Face hosts, per Nvidia, more than 3 million models and 500,000 datasets, used, per Nvidia’s count, by more than 200,000 companies. - The purchase is, per CNBC, Nvidia’s second-biggest acquisition on record, behind the $20 billion purchase of Groq assets in December. - Delangue told CNBC his company approached Huang over the summer about a deal, and “a few weeks later, here we are.”. - Hugging Face was recently hit by a hacking incident that Delangue attributed to engineering mistakes. ## What Happened? Nvidia’s **$12,930,300,000** agreement buys it Hugging Face, the hub where more than 18 million developers share open models. Jensen Huang wrote in the company’s blog post that Nvidia “**agreed to acquire Hugging Face**” and pledged to scale the platform’s infrastructure and expand global access to AI. Delangue told CNBC’s Becky Quick the two sides moved fast once talks began. “ 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. Clement DelangueCEO – HuggingFace Huang pledged the platform stays multi-cloud and multi-accelerator: Nvidia compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face. The company already hosts more than 1 million applications built by outside developers. > Exciting day for NVIDIA and [@huggingface](https://x.com/huggingface?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw). > > Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty. They allow every developer, startup, university, industry and country to build with, customize and benefit from AI. > > Thank you… > > — Jensen Huang (@JensenHuang) [September 3, 2026](https://x.com/JensenHuang/status/2095482647355244762?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw) ## Nvidia’s Growing Reach The deal ranks alongside Nvidia’s largest purchases. It follows the $20 billion acquisition of chipmaker **Groq’s assets in December** and the almost $7 billion purchase of Israeli chipmaker Mellanox in 2019. Nvidia is already Hugging Face’s largest contributor of open models and data, having released more than **500** models and 250 open datasets on the platform. This purchase extends Nvidia’s reach beyond chips into the software layer developers use daily. That scale, including [Nvidia’s headcount](https://sqmagazine.co.uk/how-many-people-work-at-nvidia/) that has grown alongside its AI push, gives Nvidia the capacity to absorb a platform serving millions without disrupting daily operations. Huang’s post also frames the deal as continuity rather than a pivot: Nvidia has contributed hundreds of open models and datasets to Hugging Face, so the acquisition formalizes a relationship that already ran deep before any deal talks began. ## The Security Backdrop Hugging Face was recently at the center of a hacking incident that raised concerns about the pace of AI and [cybersecurity tooling](https://sqmagazine.co.uk/cybersecurity-statistics/). Delangue, a longtime advocate for open-source models, blamed engineering mistakes for the attack and said his team used an Nvidia version of a Chinese open model to resolve it. A platform this size [carries a wide attack surface](https://sqmagazine.co.uk/openai-models-breach-hugging-face-internal-evaluation/); Nvidia’s engineering resources may help reduce that risk, though no acquisition removes it outright. ## SQ Magazine’s Takeaway This **$12,930,300,000** deal buys Nvidia distribution, not just infrastructure. Hugging Face is the hub where open-weight models reach developers, and owning that layer gives Nvidia influence over how millions of engineers deploy AI, regardless of which chips they run. Huang’s insistence that Nvidia compute “**will not be required**” is a deliberate signal to that community, since alienating the open-source base would gut the asset’s value overnight. The timing next to Hugging Face’s recent hacking incident is worth noting. Delangue’s own admission that engineering mistakes caused the breach suggests the platform’s security posture had not kept pace with its growth to 18 million users. Nvidia’s engineering and infrastructure resources could help harden that platform, but a single acquisition does not automatically fix the process gaps that let an attack through in the first place.