Nvidia is reportedly acquiring AI platform Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, a deal that could give the chipmaker a far stronger position in the market for openly available AI models and related cloud services.
Matthias Bastian reports for The Decoder that the information comes from The Information. Neither company is cited as confirming the transaction.
Hugging Face operates a widely used platform where developers and companies can find, share and deploy AI models. It also sells cloud services for running those models. Chief executive Clem Delangue says the company generates roughly $150 million in annual revenue and is close to profitability, according to the report.
The reported price would value Hugging Face at around 80 times its annual revenue. That reflects the strategic value Nvidia may place on the company’s developer community and its role in the open AI ecosystem.
A response to changing AI alliances
The reported deal comes as major AI labs seek to reduce their dependence on Nvidia’s processors. OpenAI is working with Broadcom on custom chips, has made a major agreement with chip company Cerebras and has secured access to AMD hardware. Anthropic is also developing its own chip technology, while Google has long built specialised AI processors.
Nvidia has separately committed $26 billion over five years to support the development of open source AI models, according to the report. Acquiring Hugging Face could help it connect that investment with a commercial platform.
One potential direction would be to expand Hugging Face’s cloud operation into a central service for accessing open-weight models, similar to how OpenRouter provides access to models from different providers. Such a service could make it easier for organisations to use models hosted on Nvidia infrastructure, while giving developers a familiar place to discover and deploy them.
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