Nvidia has agreed to acquire AI platform Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, according to reports, in a deal that would convert an existing minority stake into full ownership and extend the chip giant’s reach deep into AI software. The Nvidia Hugging Face acquisition was first reported by The Information on 26 August, with Reuters confirming it the following day, according to Yahoo Finance.
Hugging Face, founded in 2016 by French entrepreneurs Clément Delangue, Thomas Wolf and Julien Chaumond, is widely known as the ‘GitHub of machine learning’. Its platform lets developers discover, share and deploy AI models, with a particular emphasis on open-source approaches rather than the closed systems built by companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic.
The Nvidia Hugging Face Acquisition in Context
The price tag carries some eye-catching arithmetic. Yahoo Finance reports that the $12.9 billion figure represents an approximately 86x revenue multiple, based on an estimated $150 million in annual recurring revenue. That ratio reflects the premium attached to platform ownership in the AI era rather than conventional software-company valuation logic, though it also raises an obvious question: how much of that premium is really about access to the open-source developer community Hugging Face has built, rather than the revenue it currently generates?
Nvidia already had a foot in the door. According to Futurum Group, the acquisition would convert a minority stake that Nvidia has held since Hugging Face’s August 2023 Series D round into full ownership. That is a meaningful detail: Nvidia was not a late arrival bidding on a company it had only watched from a distance. It was already inside the tent.
Hugging Face’s last funding round, that Series D, raised $235 million and valued the company at approximately $4.5 billion, according to Jordan News, with Salesforce Ventures leading the round. Other investors in that raise included Sequoia Capital, Coatue, Google, Amazon, Intel, AMD, Qualcomm and IBM. The $12.9 billion deal price represents a substantial step up from that $4.5 billion valuation, itself a measure of how quickly the market’s appetite for AI infrastructure assets has shifted.
What Nvidia Gets Beyond the GPUs
Nvidia is best known for the GPUs that power the world’s leading AI models. Yet the company has been investing increasingly in software and developer tools, particularly as demand grows for open AI models and the autonomous AI agents that consume enormous amounts of computing power. Owning Hugging Face would give Nvidia a direct relationship with the developer community that builds on top of those models.
Although headquartered in New York, Hugging Face has long presented itself as a French-American company. Its largest office is in Paris. Speaking to Sifted in 2024, cofounder Julien Chaumond said the company’s global ambitions meant raising capital in the US was ‘unavoidable’, even as it continued to build much of its engineering team in Europe. Whether a Nvidia acquisition changes that European orientation is one of the more open questions the deal leaves hanging.
The open-source dimension is the other thread worth watching. Hugging Face has positioned itself explicitly as an alternative to closed AI systems. Nvidia’s interests are not straightforwardly aligned with open-source idealism: it sells the compute that runs everything, open or closed. How Hugging Face’s community reacts to full Nvidia ownership, and whether the platform’s open-source character is maintained, will shape whether the $12.9 billion makes sense on any metric beyond the headline multiple.
Reuters’ confirmation on 27 August means the deal has now been corroborated by two separate outlets, citing separate sources. Neither Nvidia nor Hugging Face has made a formal announcement at the time of writing.
