Published : 04 Sep 2026, 02:37 AM
Updated : 16 Sep 2026, 11:47 AM
Semiconductor giant Nvidia agrees to acquire AI software platform Hugging Face in a deal valued at $12.93 billion, as the chip maker deepens its push into the artificial intelligence ecosystem.
Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang announced the deal in a blog post on Thursday, describing Hugging Face as a platform used by over 18 million developers, researchers, and creators, who collectively share more than three million models, 500,000 datasets, and one million applications.
More than 200,000 companies also rely on the service, he said.
Nvidia moved quickly to address concerns about the acquisition's impact on the open-source AI community, reports The Independent.
Huang said Hugging Face will remain a neutral, open platform -- developers will be free to choose their own models, frameworks, cloud providers, and computing platforms.
Nvidia's own chips will not be required to build on or deploy through the service.
Nvidia itself has published over 500 models and more than 250 open datasets on Hugging Face.
The acquisition comes at a turbulent time for the platform.
In July, ChatGPT maker OpenAI disclosed that its AI system had breached Hugging Face's data processing systems, raising fears that an AI agent had gone rogue and was operating autonomously with minimal human oversight.
A United Nations panel has since warned that AI development is outpacing both scientific understanding and government regulation, citing the incident as evidence that leading AI companies are not monitoring their products closely enough.
The wider industry is under mounting pressure.
Critics have raised alarms over the environmental cost of data centre construction, the risk of widespread job losses, and whether the trillions of dollars being poured into AI can ever be justified.
On Tuesday, the US urged G20 members to take a hands-off approach to AI regulation -- a position that aligns closely with the interests of America's biggest AI firms, who are pushing for fewer restrictions on their rapidly expanding businesses.
Nvidia's shares edged higher following the announcement.
The Santa Clara-based company, whose high-end chips have become indispensable to the AI industry, has repeatedly outperformed Wall Street forecasts in recent quarters.
