Nvidia is moving to buy Hugging Face, the platform often called the “GitHub of AI,” in a deal valued at roughly $13 billion. If completed, it would be the largest acquisition in the chipmaker’s history and a signal that Nvidia’s ambitions extend well beyond making the GPUs that power the AI boom.
The transaction would give Nvidia ownership of the central hub where millions of open-weight AI models and datasets live, effectively adding a software distribution layer to its already dominant hardware business.
What Nvidia is actually buying
Hugging Face, founded in 2016, has grown into the default gathering place for the AI development community. The platform hosts more than 2 million public models and over 500,000 datasets, making it the single largest repository for open-weight AI resources on the internet.
More than 13 million developers use the platform.
On the financial side, Hugging Face’s annualized revenue has climbed to approximately $150 million. That figure was reportedly around $100 million just two months earlier, suggesting the kind of revenue acceleration that makes acquirers willing to pay steep premiums.
At $13 billion, the implied valuation lands at roughly 86 times Hugging Face’s current sales. For context, most enterprise software companies trade at somewhere between 10 and 30 times revenue.
This isn’t Nvidia’s first financial relationship with Hugging Face. The chipmaker participated in a $235 million Series D funding round in August 2023, which valued the startup at $4.5 billion. Nvidia reportedly came back in late 2025 with a $500 million investment offer at a $7 billion valuation, but Hugging Face turned it down.
Declining that offer looks prescient now. Hugging Face’s founders held out for nearly double the valuation in under a year.
Why this deal reshapes the AI landscape
The deal also positions Nvidia at the heart of the open-weight AI movement. While companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have built their businesses around proprietary, closed models, a parallel universe of open-weight alternatives has been expanding rapidly. Meta’s Llama family, Mistral’s models, and countless fine-tuned variants all live on Hugging Face. Owning that infrastructure gives Nvidia a strategic counterweight to the closed-model ecosystem.
There’s a tension here, though. Hugging Face’s appeal has always been its neutrality, hosting models regardless of which hardware they were trained on or which company built them. Nvidia ownership could change that calculus for some developers and organizations, particularly those actively exploring alternatives to Nvidia’s chips.
The bigger picture for Nvidia’s acquisition strategy
Before this deal, Nvidia’s largest acquisition was its $7 billion purchase of Mellanox in 2020, which brought high-speed networking technology in-house. Mellanox’s InfiniBand technology became a critical piece of the AI data center stack.
The $13 billion price tag dwarfs what Nvidia paid for Mellanox, nearly doubling it.