On September 3, 2026, NVIDIA announced an agreement to acquire Hugging Face for $12,930,300,000. The company plans to work with the platform’s team to expand its infrastructure and make artificial intelligence tools more accessible to developers and organizations. This remains an agreement: NVIDIA’s announcement does not confirm that the deal has closed.
Hugging Face has become one of the leading platforms in the open AI ecosystem. According to NVIDIA, more than 18 million developers, researchers and creators use the platform. They have shared over 3 million models, 500,000 datasets and 1 million applications. More than 200,000 companies use the service to find, evaluate, customize and deploy models.
| Metric | Reported figure |
|---|---|
| Hugging Face users | More than 18 million |
| Models on the platform | More than 3 million |
| Datasets | 500,000 |
| Applications | 1 million |
| Companies using the platform | More than 200,000 |
| NVIDIA open models | More than 500 |
| NVIDIA open datasets | More than 250 |
What NVIDIA promises to preserve
The community’s main concern is Hugging Face’s independence following its acquisition by an accelerator manufacturer. NVIDIA says the platform will remain open to the entire AI ecosystem. Users will be able to choose their models, frameworks, clouds, inference services and computing platforms. NVIDIA hardware will not be a requirement for development or deployment through Hugging Face.
The company also promises to maintain support for open-source software and open-weight models from different developers. It has separately pledged compatibility with multiple clouds and accelerators. If these commitments hold in practice, teams will be able to continue choosing infrastructure based on their specific tasks, costs and deployment requirements.
Why the deal matters to developers
NVIDIA describes itself as the largest provider of open models and datasets on Hugging Face. The company has already shared more than 500 models and over 250 datasets on the platform and is also open-sourcing its own libraries and tools. Following the acquisition, NVIDIA plans to use its infrastructure, engineering resources and global reach to improve platform reliability, security, model evaluation, inference and deployment.
For startups, businesses, universities and government organizations, open models offer access to existing capabilities without having to train every system from scratch. However, NVIDIA’s announcement reflects the prospective owner’s position. It does not disclose a timeline for closing the deal, the terms of regulatory approval or a specific plan for integrating services.
What Hugging Face users should check after the deal
Practical indicators will include continued access to models from different developers, compatibility with competing accelerators and clouds, the terms for hosting open weights, inference pricing and dataset publication policies. These measures will show how well the promised openness is maintained in the products themselves, beyond the announcement.
Source
Event and original source date: September 3, 2026.
