AI News Feed
Market watch
LG UltraFine Evo 32U990A-S Hits Record-Low $1,099 on Amazon, TechRadar ReportsNewegg Labor Day Deal: 32GB Kingston Fury Beast DDR4-3200 Kit Nearly Half Price at $179.99 with CodeGalaxy Z Fold 8 inner screen corners reported with excessive giveHuawei unveils Mate XT 2 tri-fold with privacy-screen edition as Apple prepares folding iPhoneWall Street Analysts Recommend Nvidia, Uber and Marvell for Long-Term GrowthLenovo, AMD and Huawei Put Local Large-Model AI at Center of New Devices
LG UltraFine Evo 32U990A-S Hits Record-Low $1,099 on Amazon, TechRadar ReportsNewegg Labor Day Deal: 32GB Kingston Fury Beast DDR4-3200 Kit Nearly Half Price at $179.99 with CodeGalaxy Z Fold 8 inner screen corners reported with excessive giveHuawei unveils Mate XT 2 tri-fold with privacy-screen edition as Apple prepares folding iPhoneWall Street Analysts Recommend Nvidia, Uber and Marvell for Long-Term GrowthLenovo, AMD and Huawei Put Local Large-Model AI at Center of New Devices
AI Chips & Compute

Nvidia Agrees to Acquire Hugging Face for $12.9 Billion

Nvidia has reportedly agreed to acquire open-source AI platform Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, expanding its reach into the AI software ecosystem.

AI News Feed · 2026-08-28 07:15

Hugging Face, launched in 2016 as a chatbot service for teens, open-sourced a framework for building AI applications in 2018 and launched its flagship platform for hosting open-source AI models in 2020. The platform currently hosts more than 2 million models and provides access to tens of thousands of free training datasets, user-created AI applications called Spaces, and other technical assets. More than 13 million developers rely on Hugging Face to access models and datasets for their AI applications.

The startup generates revenue through a paid version of its platform, Hugging Face Hub, which enables software teams to host projects in private repositories and offers cybersecurity controls not available in the free version. It also provides Inference Endpoints, a paid service for hosting inference workloads with autoscaling features that automate hardware capacity additions when request volumes grow.

Hugging Face has also developed its own AI models. In 2025, it released a 3-billion-parameter language model that outperformed several similarly sized algorithms. Earlier, it used donated time on a French supercomputer to train BLOOM, a 176-billion-parameter AI model.

If completed, the acquisition would put one of the most widely used platforms for sharing and working with open-source AI models under Nvidia's ownership. Siddy Jobe, a fund manager at Eonopolis Exponential Technologies funds, told CNBC's Squawk Box Europe on Thursday that it made sense for Nvidia to target a company like Hugging Face, as Nvidia has made it clear it is not looking to discriminate between closed and open-source models. "I think Nvidia is very much a community, a platform-based company, and in that respect, I think Hugging Face fits perfectly within that," Jobe said. "It is clear that Nvidia wants to be integrated in the entire stack vertically, going from energy to foundational models and also to applications."

Nvidia is among the companies that use Hugging Face to host its open-source AI projects. The acquisition gives Nvidia a presence in yet another part of the AI stack, allowing it to more closely align the platform's feature roadmap with its business goals. The deal could also intensify competition with Stripe Inc., which last week acquired AI model marketplace operator OpenRouter Inc. for a reported $7.5 billion. OpenRouter enables developers to access hosted versions of more than 400 AI models via a single interface, a capability Hugging Face also offers.