US antitrust enforcers have opened a review of Nvidia’s agreement to acquire Hugging Face, the open-source platform most labs use to publish models and datasets.
Reuters, citing two people familiar with the matter, reported that Justice Department officials want to know whether the purchase would give Nvidia leverage over a distribution channel rivals depend on. At $12.93B, the transaction is Nvidia’s largest bet yet on owning the layer where models are shared. Current guidance points to a close in the first half of 2027. Nvidia says Hugging Face would go on supporting partnerships across chipmakers, cloud operators and model developers.
The review is broader than one deal. Regulators have also examined Nvidia’s acquisitions of SchedMD and the GPU orchestration vendor it bought in 2024, its licensing arrangement with Groq, and whether customers were offered more accelerators in exchange for buying Nvidia networking gear and Groq processors alongside them.
The probe began in the Biden administration and has carried into the Trump administration.
Europe is running its own inquiry. France’s competition authority is looking at the industry’s reliance on the CUDA programming layer and at Nvidia’s stakes in cloud providers including CoreWeave, flagging possible supply restrictions, unfair contract terms and discrimination between customers.
The question at the center of both files is the same one: whether owning the marketplace is a different competitive act from owning the chips. Where the American review asks about a single platform purchase, the French case treats the wider dependence on Nvidia’s software stack as the point of concern.
