Nvidia is buying Hugging Face for almost $13 billion

Jess Weatherbed reports Nvidia has agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.93 billion. Hugging Face, founded in 2016, is the browsable library of open-source models, datasets, and tools often compared to GitHub for AI. Jensen Huang said the companies will scale the platform and expand access, that it will remain open, and that Nvidia compute will not be required to build on or deploy through it.

The last official valuation was $4.5 billion in the 2023 round Nvidia participated in. The Financial Times reported Hugging Face rejected a $500 million Nvidia investment last year that would have valued it at $7 billion, over concerns about a single dominant investor. The Information puts recent annualized revenue around $150 million.

Almost tripling the 2023 valuation to buy a barely-profitable model hub is the behavior of a company protecting a bottleneck, not hunting a return. Weatherbed's frame is the right one: closed labs are trying to make their own chips, and Nvidia's response is to own the place open-source developers already live.

The rejected 2025 check is the character note. Hugging Face did not want Nvidia as a dominant investor at $7 billion. It is accepting Nvidia as owner at $12.93 billion. That is not a change of heart about independence. It is a change in what 'scale' costs. Delangue's public thank-you — more compute, more support, more visibility — is the same sentence as surrendering the option to stay a Switzerland.

Signal Desk's read: the $150 million revenue figure is going to be used as a punchline, and it misses the point. Nvidia is not buying a P&L. It is buying the index of open weights so that the next generation of models, agents, and evals still compile against CUDA by default. Huang's neutrality pledge is the entire integration risk. If Spaces, Inference Endpoints, or search ranking start looking like an Nvidia storefront, the 18 million developers who made the asset valuable will fork the social graph, not the GPUs.

Watch the other closed labs. A chipmaker owning the open hub is a reason to host weights somewhere else, or to tighten licenses so the hub becomes less central. The deal is a bet that convenience still beats suspicion.

Deal talk leaked in late August, with Business Insider describing a $13 billion process and The Information reporting an agreed $12.9 billion figure before Nvidia confirmed. The public declaration ends the rumor and starts the trust clock.