❯ Nvidia Reportedly to Acquire Hugging Face for $12.9 Billion; Neither Side Has Announced

DEALTech outlet The Information, citing sources, reported that Nvidia has agreed to acquire open-source model hosting platform Hugging Face for $12.9 billion — nearly matching the valuation the platform sought when it was shopped days earlier, and roughly 2.9 times its $4.5 billion post-money valuation from the 2023 Series D. As of press time, neither Nvidia nor Hugging Face had issued an announcement, and no second outlet with original reporting had followed up.

BACKSTORYAn earlier round of engagement ran in the opposite direction. Earlier this year, Hugging Face rejected a $500 million investment from Nvidia at a valuation of roughly $7 billion, reasoning that it did not want a single dominant investor steering platform decisions. From the 23rd of this month, the company instead hired an investment bank to assess buyer interest. In four months, the same bidder went from a spurned minority investor to an outright acquirer — at nearly double the earlier valuation.

PORTFOLIOThe platform currently hosts more than 1 million community models, with roughly 5 million registered developers and over 10,000 enterprise customers, including Intel, Pfizer, Bloomberg, and eBay. Revenue has not been officially disclosed; media estimates put annualized revenue between $100 million and $150 million, with recent growth driven mainly by paid compute and storage. The two companies have worked together since 2023, with Nvidia integrating DGX Cloud into the platform’s training workflow.

SCRUTINYNvidia’s last major acquisition was the $40 billion purchase of Arm, abandoned after the U.S. Federal Trade Commission sued to block it; its $700 million purchase of Run:ai was later cleared unconditionally by the European Union. This deal’s sensitive point has moved: a chip supplier would also hold the distribution gateway for open-source models. Those who truly need to reassess are the enterprise technology leaders with model weights and data hosted on the platform — as the host goes from neutral platform to upstream hardware vendor, how much room is left for multi-cloud or cross-chip exit routes?

▪ SIGNALNvidia is not buying a hosting company with a little over $100 million in revenue — it is buying the door through which the world’s open-source models enter production.