"NVIDIA compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face," NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang said in announcing a definitive agreement to acquire the open-source machine learning hub.
The September 3, 2026 announcement confirmed that NVIDIA signed the merger agreement on September 2, establishing a headline valuation of $12,930,300,000 (approximately $12.93 billion). The acquisition has not closed and is expected to complete in the first half of 2027, subject to customary closing conditions and required regulatory approvals.
For developers and engineering teams who rely on Hugging Face to distribute weights or run evaluation pipelines across heterogeneous infrastructure, the pending transaction would bring the hub under hardware-vendor ownership. NVIDIA's Form 8-K filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission outlines approximately $11.9 billion payable to Hugging Face stockholders, subject to adjustments, alongside an employee equity retention program of up to approximately $1 billion.
NVIDIA's public disclosures report that Hugging Face hosts more than 18 million developers, researchers, and creators, spanning more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets, and 1 million applications across more than 200,000 companies. These figures reflect company-reported metrics rather than independent platform audits.
To address immediate concerns over ecosystem lock-in, NVIDIA announced that Hugging Face will retain its brand and remain an open platform supporting multiple clouds, inference providers, and competing accelerator silicon. In its regulatory filing, NVIDIA explicitly committed to maintaining the open uploading and downloading of models and datasets as well as continuing support for non-NVIDIA hardware vendors.
These commitments reflect announced intentions rather than operational guarantees or audited neutrality. Neither the press announcement nor the SEC filing details future pricing schedules, long-term governance structures, post-close product integrations, or feature parity commitments between NVIDIA hardware and alternative silicon.