Nvidia's Hugging Face acquisition is official: a $13 billion deal

Nvidia has confirmed its acquisition of Hugging Face, the open-source hub used to publish and download AI models, in a deal valued at close to $13 billion. This finalizes the deal RecapAI covered as a rumor last week — it's now official, with Nvidia's own regulatory filing setting the price and an expected close in the first half of 2027 pending regulatory approval. It's Nvidia's second-largest acquisition on record, trailing only its $20 billion purchase of Groq's assets late last year.

Hugging Face's scale explains the price tag: more than 18 million developers and researchers use the platform, hosting over 3 million models and serving roughly 200,000 enterprise customers. For Nvidia, this isn't primarily about owning the models themselves — it's about owning the distribution layer that shapes which hardware those models get trained and run on. Nvidia has said it will keep Hugging Face's platform open, consistent with the startup's existing practices, which matters for a developer community that has historically been wary of what happens to open infrastructure once a large company owns it.

If you rely on open-weight models — including tools built on openly-licensed foundations — this is worth tracking loosely. Nvidia's stated commitment to keeping Hugging Face open is a good early signal, but the real test will be how the platform evolves once it sits inside a company whose core business is selling the GPUs those models run on.