Nvidia has agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, TechCrunch reported on 26 August 2026. The agreement is not yet signed and could still collapse. If it closes, the largest repository of open AI models passes to the company making the chips those models run on.
Key takeaways
- Price of $12.9B — nearly triple the $4.5B valuation from its 2023 round
- The deal is unsigned and talks could still fall through
- The platform hosts roughly 2.96M public model repositories and 1M datasets
- Annual revenue is around $150M, up from $100M two months earlier
- In 2025 Nvidia offered $500M at a $7B valuation and Hugging Face declined
From a rejected offer to $12.9 billion
A year ago the same conversation went differently. Nvidia offered $500M at a $7B valuation and was turned down. Today’s price is nearly double what the whole company was worth then. Founded in 2016, the platform is approaching profitability, as CEO Clem Delangue has said, with revenue climbing from $100M to about $150M in two months.
The signals came earlier. On 24 August, Business Insider reported that Hugging Face had hired a bank to test buyer interest, without naming a bidder at the time.
| Moment | Event | Valuation |
|---|---|---|
| 2023 | Funding round | $4.5B |
| 2025 | Nvidia’s offer declined | $7B |
| 26 August 2026 | Deal agreed, unsigned | $12.9B |
Nvidia is buying the distribution layer
Hugging Face makes neither chips nor frontier models. What it controls is the point where nearly three million model repositories reach developers — the role GitHub plays for code. Microsoft paid $7.5B for GitHub.
For Nvidia it is insurance at the moment its largest cloud customers are building their own accelerators. The deal also opens a path into compute services and a way to absorb capacity customers have not used.
Why it matters
A repository’s neutrality stops being obvious once a hardware vendor owns it. Format choices, default integrations and the ordering of model recommendations look like technical decisions, yet they shape what the entire industry trains on. Hugging Face mattered precisely because it belonged to no one with a stake in the outcome. That advantage disappears with the sale, and some community trust goes with it.
What’s next?
- No signature means real risk the talks break down — TechCrunch notes the deal may not complete
- A transaction this size will require antitrust clearance in the US and EU
- The bank hired by Hugging Face is still testing other buyers, leaving room for a counter-offer
Sources
- TechCrunch — Nvidia closes in on Hugging Face acquisition
- TMTPost — 874亿，全球最大AI开源社区要卖了
