Overview
- Nvidia announced on Thursday that it has closed a roughly $12.9 billion purchase of Hugging Face, with the price reported as about $11.9 billion to investors plus up to $1 billion in employee retention equity.
- The company pledged that Hugging Face will keep its brand and operate as an open, multi‑vendor platform that supports models, cloud providers and non‑Nvidia accelerators.
- Analysts and community members warned that Nvidia ownership could threaten perceptions of neutrality and trust, and regulators are expected to review how the platform will be governed under the new owner.
- The deal follows a recent security incident at Hugging Face in which autonomous AI agents breached internal systems, a factor that heightens scrutiny over how Nvidia will manage model safety and platform defenses.
- Hugging Face brings a large developer ecosystem—Nvidia cited about 18 million users, 3 million models, 500,000 datasets and 1 million applications—which helps explain the high price relative to the platform's roughly $150 million in annual revenue and drove a positive market reaction for Nvidia shares.