NVIDIA agrees to buy Hugging Face for $12.93B.

NVIDIA has agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, pulling a major open-model platform closer to the company that supplies much of the AI industry's compute. NVIDIA says Hugging Face will remain open across models, frameworks, clouds, inference providers, and accelerators. 1

The scale explains the attention: NVIDIA says more than 18 million developers, researchers, and creators use Hugging Face, which hosts more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets, and 1 million applications. CNBC and Reuters describe the deal as a move further up the AI stack, from chips into the platform layer where builders discover and deploy models. 23

The open-platform promise is clear. The practical test comes later: whether developers using rival clouds and accelerators keep the same choices after the ownership change.