Nvidia to spend $13 billion on Hugging Face, which will remain an open
source platform
[September 04, 2026] By
MICHELLE CHAPMAN
Chipmaker Nvidia is buying artificial intelligence software platform
Hugging Face for $13 billion.
It’s the latest deal by the company, whose processors are integral to
the AI boom, and highlights Nvidia's push to champion increasingly
popular open-source AI models.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang wrote in a blog post Thursday that more than 18
million developers, researchers and creators use Hugging Face to share
more than 3 million models, 500,000 data sets and 1 million
applications. More than 200,000 companies also that use the platform, he
said.
In July, Hugging Face's data processing systems were hacked, and ChatGPT
maker OpenAI acknowledged that its artificial intelligence system was to
blame, sending shock waves through the security community amid
heightened concerns about the capabilities of powerful AI models.
Just over a week later, Anthropic said its artificial intelligence
models hacked into three other organizations during testing. That was
followed closely by an announcement from Meta, which said its AI model
accessed the internet on its own and hacked another company.
The wave of AI intrusions occurred just a month after President Donald
Trump signed an executive order creating a framework for the federal
government to vet the national security risks of the most advanced AI
systems for up to a month before their public release.
On Thursday, however, Nvidia's Huang said that Hugging face will remain
an open platform. He signaled that Nvidia is betting that more
businesses will turn to open-source AI, which lets them download and
customize their own AI models, rather than pay for proprietary AI
services from companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic.
Open models let startups, businesses, universities and public
institutions build on advanced capabilities without training every model
from scratch," Huang wrote in a blog post. "They enable organizations to
match the right model to the right job.
Hugging Face will still support multicloud and multi-accelerator
development and deployment.
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Jensen Huang, president and CEO of Nvidia, waits for a
groundbreaking ceremony for an expansion of Coherent's manufacturing
facility to begin on June 16, 2026, in Sherman, Texas. (AP
Photo/Jeffrey McWhorter, File)
 Nvidia has released more than 500
models and more than 250 open data sets on Hugging Face.
“Nvidia’s investment in Hugging Face is a strong strategic hedge
against the different ways AI could evolve,” Bret Greenstein, chief
AI officer at global business and technology consulting firm West
Monroe, said in an emailed statement. “With much of Nvidia’s
valuation tied to the adoption and expansion of AI over the next
decade, the company has a clear interest in supporting the entire
ecosystem’s success.”
Nvidia's high-end chips have emerged as the leading building blocks
for AI, and are highly sought after. The Santa Clara,
California-based company reported quarterly profits of $59.69
billion late last month.
While AI has powered stock market gains and U.S. economic growth in
recent years, there’s been growing skepticism about whether AI will
justify the trillions of dollars being spent to develop the
technology.
The AI industry is also faces increasing pushback amid objections to
the expansion of data centers and fears that the rapid speed of AI
adoption could lead to widespread job losses worldwide.
The $12.93 billion deal includes $1 billion for a retention plan for
Hugging Face employees, Huang told CNBC.
Nvidia's shares rose nearly 2% in morning trading. Hugging Face is
not publicly traded.
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AP Business Writer Kelvin Chan contributed to this report.
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