Hugging Face’s days as an independent company appear to be ending. The Information reported Wednesday night that Nvidia has agreed to buy the open model hub for $12.9B, citing a person familiar with the matter, with talks valuing it above $13B. No agreement is signed, and Business Insider says the deal could still collapse. Neither side has commented.
Owning the web’s most popular open source AI marketplace would shore up Nvidia’s chip dominance just as the largest closed labs build their own silicon. Open models keep more of the market tethered to Nvidia hardware, a logic the company has already backed with tens of billions in open source investments. The deal also hands Nvidia a route back into cloud services after it shrank DGX Cloud, and an outlet for unused capacity that customers fail to consume.
Hugging Face raised $235M in 2023 at a $4.5B valuation and now generates roughly $150M in annual revenue. It rejected a $500M Nvidia investment last year that carried a $7B valuation. Chief executive Clem Delangue has sided publicly with Nvidia’s open source push, warning that China is clearly dominating open source AI.
The premium is enormous, and the payout gives Hugging Face Nvidia’s balance sheet at a moment of consolidation, mirroring Stripe’s recent purchase of OpenRouter.
