NVIDIA, the semiconductor and AI computing giant, has agreed to acquire Hugging Face, the open-source AI platform and model hub, in a $12.93 billion transaction in the largest tech acquisition in New York City history. “We realized that Hugging Face and open source AI in general was at a turning point and that it needed more resources, more scale, more visibility,” remarked Clément Delangue, CEO of Hugging Face. “We went to see Jensen, and we told him, we want to make open source AI big. And he told us, let’s do it.”
“We realized that Hugging Face and open source AI in general was at a turning point and that it needed more resources, more scale, more visibility. We went to see Jensen, and we told him, we want to make open source AI big. And he told us, let’s do it.” – Clément Delangue
Founded by Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf in 2016, Hugging Face had raised a total of $395.2M in reported equity funding and is backed by investors that include Sequoia Capital, Bossa Invest, SV Angel, Salesforce Ventures, Lux Capital, Coatue, Qualcomm Ventures, Google, Betaworks, NVIDIA, Sound Ventures, Amazon, A.Capital Ventures, Addition, Premji Invest, Thibaud Elziere, Qualcomm, Olivier Pomel, Intel, Firestreak Ventures, IBM, Thirty Five Ventures, Terrence Rohan, Kevin Durant, AIX Ventures, Greg Brockman, Charles Zedlewski, Nicolas Steegmann, AMD, Florian Douetteau, Clement Benoit, Cygni Capital, Augusto Marietti, Rich Kleiman, Richard Socher, Dev Ittycheria, Paul St. John, Ronny Conway, Alex Wang, and Ludovic Huraux. The platform has grown to serve more than 18 million developers, researchers, and creators, hosting over 3 million models, 500,000 datasets, and 1 million applications. More than 200,000 companies use Hugging Face to discover, evaluate, customize, and deploy AI. As part of the acquisition, all three founders and the entire Hugging Face team will join NVIDIA, with Delangue confirming the platform will continue to operate as an independent, neutral entity within the combined organization.
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang announced the deal in a blog post on September 3, 2026, pledging that Hugging Face will remain multi-cloud and multi-accelerator with no requirement to use NVIDIA compute – a critical assurance for the platform’s 18 million developers. Huang was direct about the competitive stakes: with multiple bidders in the running, NVIDIA moved decisively to secure a platform it views as foundational to the future of open AI.
“Open models matters greatly to our company. When he was thinking about the next chapter of Hugging Face, it absolutely should be at Nvidia – and it’s worth every single penny.” – Jensen Huang
The $12.93B deal is the largest VC-backed tech acquisition in New York City history, more than tripling the previous record set by Jet.com’s $3.3 billion sale to Walmart in 2016. It arrives as competition over AI infrastructure 0 who controls the tooling, the models, and the deployment rails – intensifies across the industry. NVIDIA, already the dominant supplier of AI training hardware, now adds the world’s most widely used model-sharing and collaboration platform to its portfolio, with Delangue setting an ambitious target of reaching 200 million AI builders on Hugging Face in the years ahead.
