Nvidia to Acquire Hugging Face for $12.93 Billion

Nvidia Corp. signed a definitive agreement on September 3, 2026, to acquire the open-source AI platform Hugging Face for approximately $12.93 billion. The deal, the largest in Nvidia's history, includes $11.9 billion for investors and a $1 billion equity-based retention program for employees. The acquisition provides Nvidia direct access to a hub used by 18 million developers and 200,000 companies to share millions of models and datasets.

CEO Jensen Huang pledged that Hugging Face will remain an open, multi-cloud platform. He committed that Nvidia compute will not be required to build or deploy models through the service, ensuring the platform continues to support various cloud providers and computing architectures. The deal is expected to close in the first half of 2027, pending regulatory approval. Hugging Face co-founders Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf will remain with the company under six-year retention agreements.

The acquisition sparked political concern in France, where Economy Minister Roland Lescure called the deal a "wake-up call" regarding the lack of European capital to scale domestic tech champions. Simultaneously, Huang outlined a separate plan to mobilize over $500 billion in third-party capital to help AI companies fund compute infrastructure. Through Memoranda of Understanding with firms including Blackstone Inc., BlackRock, and Goldman Sachs, Nvidia proposes using GPU assets as collateral for debt via special purpose vehicles.

Financial commentator Jim Cramer reacted to these developments by urging Nvidia to authorize $500 billion in share buybacks, arguing the company's stock is undervalued despite its expanding role as a financier for AI data centers.