Nvidia in Talks to Acquire Open-Source AI Giant Hugging Face for $12.9 Billion

In what could become the largest artificial intelligence M&A transaction of the decade, industry sources report that Nvidia is in advanced negotiations to acquire Hugging Face, the dominant open-source AI model repository and developer hub, for approximately $12.9 billion.

Hugging Face has long served as the central node for open-source AI collaboration, hosting hundreds of thousands of pre-trained models, datasets, and machine learning applications. By bringing Hugging Face into its corporate fold, Nvidia aims to tighten the integration between its enterprise hardware platforms and open-source model deployment workflows.

While open-source developers have voiced concerns regarding potential consolidation and platform neutrality, tech analysts suggest Nvidia intends to maintain Hugging Face's open platform while embedding optimized inference runtimes and specialized CUDA acceleration libraries directly into the hub's default tooling.