The AI Model Repository Nvidia Now Wants to Own

Nvidia is buying Hugging Face. The chip giant agreed to acquire the AI model repository for approximately $12.9 billion, or nearly $13 billion, in a deal designed to strengthen its position in open-source AI.

The agreement became official on a Thursday morning after weeks of rumors. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang will now have a deeper route into Hugging Face’s platform, which hosts large language models, maintains a large library of open-source data sets, and provides online tools for developers.

Hugging Face operates as a cloud repository for AI models, much like GitHub serves software developers. Its platform also includes work on models used in robotics and physical AI applications, giving Nvidia access to more than a collection of downloadable files.

A Repository With Strategic Weight

Hugging Face was founded in 2016 by three French entrepreneurs in New York City. The company had raised nearly $400 million in venture capital funding as of December 2025, with backers including Betaworks, Lux Capital, Sequoia Ventures, Coatue, and Addition.

Its individual investors include Greg Brockman, Richard Socher, and Kevin Durant. The company’s business is reportedly not yet profitable, which makes the acquisition price less about current earnings and more about control of a central meeting point for developers, models, and open-source research.

Nvidia had already invested in Hugging Face before agreeing to acquire it. The company also released its own family of open models, called Nemotron, and has supported open-weight models as alternatives to proprietary systems from OpenAI and Anthropic.

Huang has framed that position as a practical advantage rather than an ideological one: “Open models let startups, businesses, universities and public institutions build on advanced capabilities without training every model from scratch.”

That argument matters because open models can spread AI development beyond the companies that own the largest proprietary systems. Nvidia supplies much of the hardware needed to train and run those systems, and owning a major open-model platform would give it a closer connection to the software and developer activity built around that hardware.

Nvidia’s Broader AI Position

Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue has made the same case from the platform side. “Thanks to the community, we’ve shown that it can be a complement, and even an alternative, to closed-source APIs. But for it to happen at larger scale, it needs more compute, more support, more collaboration and more visibility.”

Nvidia can provide the compute, while Hugging Face brings the community, model library, data sets, and developer tools. That combination could help Nvidia expand its deep integration with the AI industry instead of remaining tied to the sale of chips and related systems.

The timing reflects a more crowded hardware market. OpenAI, Anthropic, and other frontier labs have begun investing in their own hardware for training and running models, challenging Nvidia’s position from inside the customer base it helped build.

Hugging Face also brings exposure to AI agents. Its platform was hacked by AI agents from OpenAI, an incident that underlines both the reach of these systems and the security problems surrounding shared AI infrastructure. A model repository can become an industry hub—and, inconveniently, a valuable target.

The acquisition gives Nvidia a platform that reaches large language models, open-source data sets, robotics, physical AI, and developer workflows. For Hugging Face, it provides access to Nvidia’s resources as the company tries to scale a business that has not yet reached profitability.

For Nvidia, the $12.9 billion price is a bet that the future of AI will not belong only to closed systems from OpenAI, Anthropic, and other frontier labs. It is also a bet that the company can own more of the stack without making its ecosystem feel closed. That is the difficult part—buying the open internet’s favorite model library is easier than keeping it open.

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