NVIDIA Acquires Hugging Face for $12.9303 Billion

en.Wedoany.com Reported - On September 3, NVIDIA officially announced that it has agreed to acquire Hugging Face, an AI development platform, for $12.9303 billion. NVIDIA signed the definitive acquisition agreement on September 2, with the transaction expected to close in the first half of 2027, subject to customary closing conditions and regulatory approvals.

According to regulatory filings submitted by NVIDIA, the transaction includes approximately $11.9 billion in consideration to be paid to Hugging Face shareholders, as well as an equity retention plan of up to approximately $1 billion for Hugging Face employees joining NVIDIA. Hugging Face was previously valued at approximately $4.5 billion in a funding round in 2023, in which NVIDIA had already participated.

Upon completion of the transaction, Hugging Face will continue to operate as an open platform. NVIDIA has committed that developers will still be free to choose their own models, development frameworks, cloud services, inference service providers, and computing platforms, and that building or deploying AI applications using Hugging Face will not require the use of NVIDIA computing platforms. The platform will also continue to support other chip vendors and allow users to upload and download models and datasets of their choice.

Hugging Face currently has over 18 million developers, researchers, and creators, with the platform hosting more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets, and 1 million applications. Over 200,000 enterprises use the platform to discover, evaluate, customize, and deploy AI models and applications. NVIDIA plans to continue expanding the Hugging Face platform and increase infrastructure investment after the transaction closes.

Hugging Face was co-founded in 2016 by Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumont, and Thomas Wolf. Following the announcement of the transaction, Thomas Wolf stated that the three co-founders will continue to serve at the company under a 6-year retention arrangement. After the transaction closes, the Hugging Face team will join the NVIDIA ecosystem while continuing to operate the existing open model platform.