Jensen Huang announced today, in a post mirrored on X and LinkedIn, that NVIDIA "has agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12,930,300,000." We flagged conflicting reports on this exact deal two weeks ago: Bloomberg's sourcing said no deal had been reached and talks could still fall apart, while The Information and Reuters reported NVIDIA had already agreed to buy at $12.9 billion. Today's figure — precise to the dollar rather than rounded — comes down almost exactly on the side of the reports Bloomberg's own sourcing contradicted.
The concern the announcement never mentions
Hugging Face turned down a $500 million NVIDIA investment in late 2025 that would have valued the company at $7 billion — reportedly because it didn't want a single dominant investor. Today's deal is the opposite of a minority stake: NVIDIA now owns the whole company, at nearly 1.85 times that earlier valuation and roughly 2.9 times Hugging Face's last funding-round valuation of $4.5 billion. Jensen Huang's announcement doesn't mention the 2025 offer, the dominance concern, or why the calculus changed. It doesn't need to for the deal to close, but it's a conspicuous silence given that this blog's own earlier coverage named it as the thing to watch for.
What the announcement does say, repeatedly and specifically, reads like an answer to that exact concern without ever naming it: "NVIDIA compute will not be required to build on or deploy through the platform." Developers keep choosing "the models, frameworks, clouds, inference providers and computing platforms that best fit their work." Multi-cloud and multi-accelerator support continues. Whether that holds in practice once the acquisition actually closes is the real test of whether 2025's stated objection got addressed or just became moot.
The philosophy Jensen Huang cites is one this blog already covered
Jensen Huang frames the deal as a continuation of a stance NVIDIA has held publicly for weeks: "Recently, I coauthored an open letter on the importance of open weights to the AI economy... open weights broaden access to AI and help ensure that AI leadership is distributed across companies, institutions and communities." That's the same "Open Weights and American AI Leadership" coalition letter from July 24, which Jensen Huang shared in his first-ever post on X, published in the middle of a fight over whether Washington should restrict open-weight models entirely. Buying the platform that hosts most of the open-weight ecosystem is a considerably more concrete move than signing a letter about it.
The scale, in the numbers NVIDIA chose to publish
Hugging Face hosts more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets, and 1 million applications, serving over 18 million developers, researchers, and creators, with more than 200,000 companies using the platform to find and deploy models. NVIDIA's own framing of its stake in that ecosystem: "the largest contributor of open models and data to Hugging Face," with more than 500 models and 250 open datasets released there. Founder Clément Delangue is credited by Jensen Huang as having initiated the conversation: "I am honored that Clem came to me as he considered the next chapter of Hugging Face."
The deal also lands roughly a week after OpenAI's own technical report on how its internal agents breached Hugging Face's infrastructure during July security testing. Nothing in either company's announcement connects the two events, and there's no basis to assume they're related — but Jensen Huang's list of what NVIDIA's infrastructure will improve includes "platform reliability, safety, model evaluation, inference and deployment capabilities," which is a notable set of priorities to name in the same month that incident became public.
Clément Delangue confirms, in his own words
Hugging Face co-founder and CEO Clément Delangue confirmed the deal in a post mirrored on LinkedIn and X: "10 years after starting Hugging Face, open-source AI is at an inflection point... But for it to happen at larger scale, it needs more compute, more support, more collaboration and more visibility. That's why we went to talk to Jensen, who offered to do exactly that with us." His account echoes the "compute agnostic" language from NVIDIA's own announcement: he says NVIDIA has "committed to strongly supporting Hugging Face and our mission while keeping the platform open, independent and compute agnostic," and confirms "the founders and the team are all staying to keep pushing this mission forward." Delangue also credits NVIDIA's existing open-source record — he calls the company the "King of American open-source AI," a label he says he used earlier this year — and frames the combined goal as "empowering 100 million AI builders to own their intelligence rather than rent it," a number that doesn't appear anywhere in NVIDIA's own materials.
Thomas Wolf, on the record
Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf posted his own account of the deal on X, tracing the company back to "2016, as a tiny team of scrappy underdogs" who "certainly did not anticipate... that the field would grow so much." His version of who approached whom matches Jensen Huang's: "Jensen offered @ClementDelangue the opportunity to double down on building the Hub as an open, independent and compute agnostic platform, we decided the time was right to start the next 10 years of our journey together." He's also direct about what doesn't change: "nothing changes for our users today." And he points out something NVIDIA's own announcement left for the audience to find themselves — the acquisition price allegedly encodes "Hugging Face and Nvidia references hidden in our $12,930,300,000 acquisition price," an easter egg neither company's official materials explain.
The business rationale, according to Jensen Huang on CNBC
Jensen Huang and Clément Delangue also appeared together on CNBC on announcement day, and the conversation added detail neither company's own written materials do. Delangue said Hugging Face approached NVIDIA over the summer, once it became clear the platform needed more scale and resources than it could raise on its own to sustain what both founders have called an inflection point for open-source AI — a specific timeline neither founder's own social post gave. Huang, for his part, offered an actual business case rather than just a mission statement: closed models remain highly effective, he said, but enterprises that need control over their own proprietary data, sovereignty, or intellectual property need an open alternative — and he described open models as a major growth driver, representing a large share of NVIDIA's business outside cloud service providers. That reframes the neutrality language from NVIDIA's written announcement: on CNBC, buying Hugging Face reads less like open-source patronage and more like NVIDIA identifying a specific, sizeable customer segment it can only serve with open models, and deciding to own the platform those customers already use.