Nvidia Agrees to Buy Hugging Face for $12.9 Billion

The Deal

Nvidia has agreed to buy Hugging Face, a platform where developers share artificial intelligence models, for $12.9 billion. Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang announced the agreement in a blog post on Thursday, according to CNBC.

Huang wrote that Hugging Face will "remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem" and said the company would scale the platform, strengthen its infrastructure and expand access to AI for developers and institutions.

Financial Post, citing people familiar with the matter, had reported before the announcement that the transaction could total about $14 billion and might include a $1 billion retention package for Hugging Face employees. CNBC reported the agreed price as $12.9 billion. The sources do not explain the gap between the two figures.

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Who Approached Whom

Hugging Face chief executive Clément Delangue told CNBC's Becky Quick on "Squawk Box" that his company approached Huang over the summer, "and a few weeks later, here we are."

"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," Delangue said. He added that Nvidia was "a perfect home" and that discussions moved quickly.

Huang wrote that he was "honored that Clem came to me as he considered the next chapter of Hugging Face."

Company Background and Prior Nvidia Deals

Hugging Face was founded in 2016 and runs a platform for sharing AI models that others can use freely, Financial Post reported. The company was valued at $4.5 billion in a funding round three years ago, and Nvidia was already an investor alongside Alphabet's Google, Amazon, Intel and Salesforce.

The purchase is Nvidia's second biggest on record, CNBC said, after a $20 billion purchase of assets from chipmaker Groq in December. Before that its largest was Israeli chipmaker Mellanox for almost $7 billion in 2019.

Hugging Face was recently at the centre of a cybersecurity incident. Financial Post reported that a model being tested by OpenAI inadvertently hacked the platform, and that OpenAI has said it could have reacted sooner. Delangue blamed engineering mistakes and told CNBC his company used an Nvidia version of a Chinese open model to resolve it.

An Early Investor

One beneficiary is basketball player Kevin Durant. talkSPORT reported a post on X by Joe Pompliano saying Durant and business partner Rich Kleiman invested in Hugging Face's seed and Series A rounds.

Pompliano wrote that Durant put in $100,000 at seed and $150,000 at Series A, and likely made more than $60 million. Durant signed a two-year contract with the Houston Rockets worth $90 million in 2025, with a player option for over $46 million for the 2027-28 season.