Nvidia confirms $13 billion acquisition of open-weight AI platform Hugging Face

Nvidia confirms $13 billion acquisition of open-weight AI platform Hugging Face

Jake Conley · Breaking Business News Reporter

Thu, September 3, 2026 at 5:28 PM GMT+3 4 min read

• NVDA +0.99%

Nvidia (NVDA) on Thursday confirmed its plans to acquire the open-weight AI platform Hugging Face for roughly $13 billion, sending shares up more than 1% in early trading.

The deal will see Nvidia pay $12.93 billion for the platform, per a press release. More than 18 million developers, researchers, and creators use Hugging Face to share more than 3 million models, and more than 200,000 companies use the platform to discover and deploy AI, Nvidia said.

The move highlights how Nvidia has thrown its weight behind open-weight AI models. In a statement, Nvidia said Hugging Face would remain "an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem," that the company would continue to support open-weight and open-source AI models, and that Nvidia itself is the largest contributor of open models and data to the Hugging Face platform.

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In a call following the announcement, Nvidia enterprise computing general manager Justin Boitano said the company "believe[s] in having a healthy ecosystem of closed models and open models leads to a world where you're going to continue to train these models and run these models at scale."

The only way for the Hugging Face user-base to grow, Boitano said, is to keep giving those developers optionality in terms of the hardware, clouds, and other parts of the stack that they build on, even if "Nvidia will benefit from the training that's done and the inference that's done on our hardware."

"Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty," Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang posted on X about the acquisition. "They allow every developer, startup, university, industry and country to build with, customize and benefit from AI."

The deal is expected to close in the first half of 2027, pending regulatory approval.

For Nvidia, the deal represents a "great strategic move," BD8 CEO and Nvidia investor Barbara Doran told Yahoo Finance on Thursday, arguing that Nvidia is "positioning themselves to be much more of an AI platform rather than just a supplier of chips."

"Right now, chip … demand is huge, but they are positioning themselves for the day when that will slow down," Doran said. That day "still looks like it's far in the future. But that will happen at some point."

The move also shouldn't worry investors who might approach the expenditure with some eyebrows raised toward the balance sheet, Doran said. Given Nvidia's free cash flow — expected to reach near $200 billion for fiscal-year 2027, "$13 billion … is not a big bite," Doran told Yahoo Finance.

The Street seems to be net-positive on the news, with Nvidia stock gaining close to 2% in the first hour of the trading session on Thursday.

The news, which was previously reported but had yet to be confirmed by Nvidia itself, comes as the company increasingly looks to position itself as the so-called "platform" on which the rest of the AI tech stack operates.

In comments on a call with analyst following the company's most recent earnings report, Huang cited his view of Nvidia's positioning at the bedrock level of the AI buildout as "one platform, fungible for every model and workload, durable for the entire life cycle of AI."

"Nvidia's fully proven full-stack platform is uniquely suited to help sovereigns, neoclouds and enterprises build their AI infrastructure, bring it to full operation, continuously optimize it through CUDA software and connect it to offtake demand from our vast developer ecosystem," Huang said. "All of the AI services at some point are going to want to go around the world … I think they're going to run on NVIDIA all around the world."

The acquisition of Hugging Face represents the latest move by Nvidia to build and control the AI ecosystem, CFRA Research equity analyst Angelo Zino told Yahoo Finance.

"I think it's less about the financials, at least today or even over the next 12, 18, 24 months, [and] it's more along the lines of building that AI ecosystem and trying to develop more and more capabilities and technology out there for the AI ecosystem, for physical AI, to really continue to come to fruition and build it out," Zino said.

"Obviously, as the AI ecosystem grows, it ultimately translates to greater adoption, greater appetite and demand for what Nvidia is doing," Zino added.

Jake Conley is a breaking news reporter covering US equities for Yahoo Finance. Follow him on X at @byjakeconley or email him at jake.conley@yahooinc.com.

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