Nvidia in talks to buy Hugging Face for over $13 billion
The chip giant that powers most of the AI business is reportedly moving to buy the platform where much of the open-source world lives.
Nvidia has been in serious talks to acquire Hugging Face at a valuation above $13 billion, Business Insider reported on Wednesday, citing a person familiar with the matter. Microsoft also met with Hugging Face about a deal, but those conversations are no longer ongoing, the report said — a sign that Nvidia has emerged as the lead suitor for the de facto home of open models. Neither company has commented, and Reuters said it could not immediately verify the report, so the deal remains unconfirmed.
It is a striking fit on paper. Hugging Face is the infrastructure backbone of the open-weights ecosystem — the hub where models, datasets, and inference code are hosted, served, and shared by the vast majority of the AI community. That community, in turn, runs overwhelmingly on Nvidia's GPUs. For Nvidia, owning the platform would mean controlling a central distribution channel for open models at a moment when its hardware dominance is the industry's single biggest strategic chokepoint — and it follows days after Nvidia posted a $96 billion quarter and an eye-popping growth forecast. A $13 billion-plus price tag would nearly triple the $4.5 billion post-money valuation Hugging Face last set in a 2023 round led by Salesforce Ventures, with Alphabet, GV, and IBM Ventures all aboard.
The move carries real tension. Hugging Face has built its reputation as a neutral, community-first platform — its founder Clément Delangue has repeatedly framed the company as a steward of AI builders' data and models rather than a merchant. A tie-up with Nvidia, the supplier almost every lab is already dependent on, would put the chipmaker squarely in the middle of the open-model ecosystem, raising questions about how neutral and open that ecosystem stays. If the deal closes, expect rivals like Microsoft and OpenAI — who are busy building their own model layers and just paid billions for compute — to treat it as the opening of a new front in the fight over who controls the AI stack.
We flagged this as it gathered steam earlier this week — Hugging Face explores a sale at a $13B valuation. A Nvidia deal is the next chapter of the same story.
What to watch: whether Nvidia confirms the talks, and what it promises about keeping Hugging Face open and model-agnostic.
Is Nvidia the right keeper for the open-model town square, or should a neutral steward hold it? Tell us in the comments.
