Nvidia confirms it is buying Hugging Face for $12.9 billion

Nvidia has agreed to acquire Hugging Face, according to a post on the Nvidia blog written by CEO Jensen Huang. Huang's words are that Nvidia "has agreed to acquire" the company, and he puts the price on the record at exactly $12,930,300,000.

Read that as an announced agreement to buy, not a completed purchase. The post names no expected closing date, no regulatory conditions, no financing structure and no cash-versus-stock split, and it is a company blog post rather than an SEC filing. The deal is agreed and announced. It has not closed, cleared antitrust review, or been given a timetable.

The number every wire rounded off

Almost every headline called it $12.9 billion. Nvidia's own figure is $12,930,300,000, precise to the hundred thousand dollars. That odd tail is the detail worth carrying, because it is the kind of number that comes out of a signed price mechanism rather than a reporter's estimate. The company did not write "about $12.9 billion." It wrote the exact figure.

The number that moved before the announcement

The pre-announcement reporting did not agree with itself. Blockonomi had Nvidia "nearing" a roughly $14 billion deal, "expected imminently." The Information had reported $12.9 billion as already agreed. A CNBC source described ongoing talks with nothing signed. Wired framed it as a "$129 billion bet," which does not match Nvidia's own number, so treat that as Wired's framing and not as a price. What settles it is that Nvidia has now put its own figure on the record, and TechCrunch confirmed the $12.9 billion against the company's post.

Our own call held up

This is the part worth pausing on. On 28 August, Finpresso wrote that there was no signed agreement, no 8-K and no company statement, and said to treat the $12.9 billion as a reported number rather than a closed one. Nvidia has now confirmed it to the dollar. The reported figure held up.

That earlier post carried context, attributed to The Information, that is worth reusing now that there is a price. Hugging Face was generating roughly $150 million in annualized revenue, which puts $12.93 billion at roughly 86 times sales. Hugging Face raised $235 million at a $4.5 billion valuation in 2023, with Nvidia among the investors, and in January it rejected a reported $500 million Nvidia investment that valued it at $7 billion. The company that said no to a $7 billion mark eight months ago has now agreed to sell outright at nearly twice that.

What the platform actually is, and the pledge for builders

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 discover, evaluate, customize and deploy AI. Nvidia says it is the largest single contributor there, with more than 500 models and more than 250 open datasets of its own on the platform. That concentration is exactly why the Hub is now systemically important, a point an earlier security incident touching OpenAI's Hugging Face footprint made in a harder way.

The line that matters most for anyone building on the Hub today is Huang's explicit commitment 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 references an open letter he coauthored on the importance of open weights, the kind of ecosystem that carries releases like Tencent's open-source Hunyuan preview. Nvidia's pattern of using its balance sheet to shape the ecosystem it sells into is not new, as its $105 billion residual-value backstop on OpenAI's Ohio campus showed, and it colors how you read a neutrality pledge from the company that owns both the accelerators and the registry.

The takeaway

Do not model this as done. Model it as an agreed deal waiting on the paperwork that a blog post does not provide: an 8-K, a defined close, and any regulatory review a $12.9 billion acquisition by the dominant AI-chip vendor will draw. The date to watch is the first filing, because that is where a real closing timeline, conditions and the cash-versus-stock split finally appear. For a team building on the Hub right now, the operative sentence is "NVIDIA compute will not be required." Hold Nvidia to it in writing when the definitive agreement lands, rather than to a founder's blog post, and keep your deployment portable across accelerators until it is contractual.