Nvidia to Acquire Hugging Face for $12.9 Billion

en.Wedoany.com Reported - On August 26, a person familiar with the matter said that Nvidia has agreed to acquire the open-source AI platform Hugging Face for $12.9 billion. Based on Hugging Face's recent annualized revenue of over $150 million, the transaction price is equivalent to approximately 86 times its annualized revenue. As of August 27, neither Nvidia nor Hugging Face had publicly confirmed the deal, nor had they disclosed the payment method, regulatory approvals, or expected closing timeline; additionally, people familiar with the negotiations said the two parties have not yet signed a final agreement, and the talks could still fall through.

Founded in 2016, Hugging Face primarily operates a sharing platform for AI models, datasets, and development tools. According to data released by Hugging Face this year, the platform had reached 13 million users by the end of 2025, with over 2 million public models and more than 500,000 public datasets; as of August 2026, the number of public models on the platform has exceeded 3 million. Another recent document shows that the platform currently has approximately 15 million developers and 400,000 organizational accounts.

Hugging Face's recent annualized revenue has exceeded $150 million, a 50% increase from approximately $100 million two months ago. Co-founder and CEO Clément Delangue previously stated that the number of paid subscription users doubled in the first half of this year, and the company is close to achieving profitability. Hugging Face's revenue sources include enterprise subscriptions as well as computing services such as model training, inference, and storage.

Nvidia was already an investor in Hugging Face. In 2023, Hugging Face completed a $235 million Series D funding round at a valuation of $4.5 billion, with participants including Nvidia, Google, Amazon, Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, and IBM. At the end of 2025, Hugging Face also rejected a $500 million investment proposal from Nvidia, which corresponded to a company valuation of approximately $7 billion.

Hugging Face currently offers model hosting, development tools, and computing resource services, while also supporting developers in accessing AI infrastructure from different vendors. Nvidia itself is also developing the Nemotron series of open models and has been distributing related models and development resources through Hugging Face. Prior to the news of this $12.9 billion acquisition, Hugging Face's previous funding round valued the company at $4.5 billion, making the transaction price approximately 2.9 times that valuation.

On August 19, the AI model routing platform OpenRouter confirmed it had joined Stripe. OpenRouter currently processes over 10 trillion tokens per day, covering more than 400 AI models, with over 10 million users and businesses. The transaction price was not publicly disclosed by either party, but multiple people familiar with the matter cited a figure of approximately $7.5 billion, higher than the $1.3 billion valuation from the company's funding round in May this year.