Nvidia buys Hugging Face for $12.9B to control open AI model hub

nvidia plans to acquire hugging face for approximately $12.9 billion, consisting of $11.9 billion in purchase price and up to $1 billion in stock to keep staff on board. the deal, announced by nvidia ceo jensen huang on september 3, 2026, gives nvidia control of a major hub for open ai models, used by 18 million developers who share over 3 million models, 500,000 datasets, and 1 million applications on the platform. nvidia promises to keep hugging face open to everyone, with no requirement for nvidia hardware, and support for other clouds and chips. this acquisition affects the open ai ecosystem and nvidia's hardware sales, as the company faces increasing competition from closed labs designing their own silicon.