Nvidia confirms it is buying Hugging Face for $12.9 billion

Nvidia is buying Hugging Face. Jensen Huang put the price on the company blog at exactly $12,930,300,000.

Huang's wording is that Nvidia "has agreed to acquire" the open-source AI hub. The post names no closing date, no regulatory conditions, and no cash-versus-stock split. It is a CEO blog post, not an SEC filing. The deal is announced. It has not closed.

Almost every headline rounded that figure to $12.9 billion. Nvidia wrote $12,930,300,000, down to the hundred thousand dollars. That is the kind of tail you get from a signed price formula, not from a reporter's estimate. The company did not write "about $12.9 billion."

The rumor mill did not agree with itself before Huang posted. Blockonomi had Nvidia "nearing" a roughly $14 billion deal "expected imminently." The Information already had $12.9 billion as agreed. A CNBC source described talks with nothing signed. Wired called it a "$129 billion bet," a figure that does not match Nvidia's own number. TechCrunch confirmed the $12.9 billion against the company post.

Finpresso wrote on 28 August that there was no signed agreement, no 8-K, and no company statement, and that $12.9 billion was still a reported number. Nvidia has now confirmed it to the dollar.

That earlier reporting, attributed to The Information, also had the operating context. Hugging Face was generating roughly $150 million in annualized revenue, which puts $12.93 billion at about 86 times sales. The company raised $235 million at a $4.5 billion valuation in 2023, with Nvidia already among the investors. In January it rejected a reported $500 million Nvidia investment that valued it at $7 billion. Eight months later it agreed to sell outright at nearly twice that mark.

Hugging Face is used by more than 18 million developers, researchers, and creators, who share more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets, and 1 million applications. More than 200,000 companies use it to find, evaluate, customize, and deploy AI. Nvidia says it is already the largest single contributor, with more than 500 models and more than 250 open datasets of its own on the Hub.

The sentence that matters for anyone building there today is Huang's pledge that Hugging Face "will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem," and that "NVIDIA compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face." He says it stays multi-cloud and multi-accelerator, keeps its "same iconic brand," and that founders Clem, Julien, and Thomas stay on, with Clem the one who came to him. Huang also pointed to an open letter he coauthored on open weights.

Nvidia has used its balance sheet to shape the ecosystem it sells into before, including a $105 billion residual-value backstop on OpenAI's Ohio campus. A neutrality promise from the company that owns both the accelerators and the registry will get tested in the definitive agreement, not in a blog post. The first 8-K is where a close date, conditions, and the cash-versus-stock split finally have to appear.

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