Nvidia has agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12,930,300,000, according to a company blog post reported by Fortune on September 3, 2026. The agreement values the AI-model repository at a fraction of the sums flowing through the broader AI industry, but it marks a striking exit for a company that started as a scrappy side project.
Hugging Face was founded in 2016 by three French entrepreneurs living in New York City, who named it after the 🤗 emoji. Over the following decade, it has grown into a trusted repository for AI developers, per Fortune's reporting.
'It's been a wild ride for Hugging Face,' cofounder Thomas Wolf said on X. 'We certainly did not anticipate, back in 2016, as a tiny team of scrappy underdogs, that the field would grow so much or that the impact we could have on it would become so massive.'
The platform currently counts 18 million individual users and 200,000 enterprise clients, Nvidia told reporters. 'Our goal is to get to 100 million AI builders in the next few years, and we think with the support of Nvidia, we have more chances to get there faster,' Hugging Face CEO and cofounder Clément Delangue said.
Not everyone is cashing in. Eric Hartford, creator of an open-weight model called Dolphin, Chief Scientist of lazarusaie.com, and founder of quixi.ai, told Fortune it is 'unfortunate [Hugging Face] never found a way for us to monetize our creations.' 'If I got a dollar for every download of Dolphin I'd be rich,' he said.
Nvidia's interest in Hugging Face is not new. It backed the company's 2023 Series D round, which valued Hugging Face at $4.5 billion, according to TechCrunch. Last year, Hugging Face turned down a $500 million investment offer from Nvidia that would have valued the company at $7 billion, because it would have made Nvidia the largest minority shareholder — a step the founders resisted to preserve the platform's independence, the Financial Times reported.
Delangue did not confirm the earlier $500 million figure and said prior reporting on the company's fundraising can be 'quite far from reality.' 'I think this summer the planets aligned,' he said, adding that Nvidia's growing conviction — and his own — made the deal 'the best thing to do for Hugging Face, but also for the field and for AI in general.'
Delangue's remarks come after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang signed a letter on the importance of open-weight models, which became his first post on X. 'Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty,' the letter said. Hugging Face also gained wider name recognition this summer after OpenAI's models were reported to have accessed its repositories during training.
Nvidia said Hugging Face 'will remain an open platform' and that 'Nvidia compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face.' Still, some in the industry suspect the platform already leans toward Nvidia hardware, and that the acquisition will accelerate that tilt.
The deal illustrates where capital is placing its bets in the AI race: not solely on chips, but on the gatekeepers that decide how those chips get used. Nvidia paid a premium to sit inside that gate rather than outside it. Meanwhile, the developers whose free labor built Hugging Face's library of models saw none of the payout — a reminder that in the open-source economy, the market rewards the platform that captures value, not always the creators who generate it.
