Nvidia has agreed to purchase the AI model platform Hugging Face for EUR 11 billion, marking the largest outright acquisition in the chipmaker’s history. The transaction represents a significant move by the EUR 5 trillion company to accelerate artificial intelligence adoption while strengthening its influence across the industry.
The deal notably exceeds Nvidia’s previous largest purchase, the EUR 6 billion acquisition of networking firm Mellanox in 2020, which helped the company expand beyond chip design into full data center infrastructure. Nvidia aims to close the Hugging Face takeover by 2027, though the transaction is expected to draw attention from competition regulators.
Hugging Face had turned down a substantial Nvidia investment last year at a EUR 6 billion valuation in order to preserve its independence. The New York-based platform functions as a repository for millions of AI models and datasets and has emerged as a leading advocate for open AI systems.
Why Nvidia Is Betting on Open-Weight Models
Nvidia framed the acquisition as a way to speed the spread of open models. Unlike proprietary systems from labs such as OpenAI and Anthropic, open-weight models have publicly available designs, allowing users to download, customize, and run them on their own hardware.
“Open weights enable start-ups, established businesses, universities, and public institutions to build on advanced capabilities without training every model from scratch or paying frontier-model prices for every task,” said Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang in a statement. He added that this approach allows AI to “scale sustainably into billions of everyday tasks across factories, hospitals, farms, classrooms, and Main Street businesses.”
As the world’s most valuable company and the largest designer of advanced AI chips, Nvidia has committed hundreds of billions of dollars toward start-up investments, loan backstops, and financial guarantees intended to expand the AI ecosystem and generate greater demand for its products.
What the Deal Means for Developers
The acquisition gives Nvidia control of one of the primary distribution channels shaping how AI applications are adopted worldwide. The company, which has developed its own family of models, pledged that Hugging Face “will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem.”
According to Nvidia, the more than 18 million developers using the platform will retain the ability to choose which models, cloud providers, and chips they use. Named after the “hugging face” emoji, the platform hosts 3 million primarily open AI models, roughly 500,000 datasets, and 1 million AI applications. More than 200,000 companies rely on it to discover AI features.
“We will have to get through all the regulatory review. But we think overwhelmingly they’re going to see this as really a positive outcome,” said Justin Boitano, vice president of enterprise AI at Nvidia.
The growth of open-weight models could also create new demand channels for Nvidia’s chip business, reducing its reliance on major customers such as OpenAI and Anthropic, both of which are developing their own AI processors. Huang has directed the company’s financial resources toward open model developers, including Reflection AI, and toward supporting neoclouds such as
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Image: arstechnica.com
