Nvidia has confirmed its acquisition of Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, ending weeks of speculation.

Hugging Face hosts over 3 million models, 1 million applications used by 18 million+ developers, and 500,000 datasets.

In a blog post, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang stated that Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem, emphasizing that developers can choose any model, framework, cloud, inference provider, or computing platform, and that Nvidia compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face.

Huang highlighted Nvidia‘s open contributions, including over 500 models and 250 open datasets released on Hugging Face, and argued that open models are vital for cybersecurity and the American economy.

Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue thanked the community for proving the platform could be an alternative to closed-source APIs, but noted that larger scale requires more compute, support, collaboration, and visibility, which led to discussions with Jensen.

Hugging Face was founded in 2016, raised over $395 million, with its last round in 2023 led by Salesforce Ventures and including Google, Amazon, IBM, and Nvidia.

Last year, the company rejected a $500 million offer from Nvidia, according to the Financial Times. Hugging Face reportedly clocks $150 million in annualized revenue and is nearing profitability.

Nvidia has been heavily investing in model development, recently striking a $6 billion deal with Poolside and infusing over $50 billion into AI frontier labs.

Huang emphasized that almost all open models run on Nvidia hardware and that open models are crucial for emerging cybersecurity companies.

In July, Delangue noted that Nvidia‘s open model helped Hugging Face defend against cyberattacks after proprietary models failed.

The acquisition positions Nvidia to sell its unused capacity to enterprise customers packaged with Hugging Face‘s offerings, reinforcing its dominance in AI hardware while maintaining an open ecosystem.