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Nvidia To Buy Hugging Face For $12.9 Billion, Report Claims
EDITORS: THIS HAS BEEN PRODUCED BY SOFTWARE UNDER DEVELOPMENT - THE CONTENT MAY REQUIRE EXTENSIVE EDITING
In addition to hosting models, datasets, and applications, Hugging Face provides software that helps developers optimize and deploy AI models on different CPUs, GPUs, and AI accelerators, while its Inference Endpoints service lets customers run models on managed infrastructure hosted by AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft [tomshardware.com] Azure.
To make things simple, Inference Endpoints allows customers to select the provider, region, hardware type, and instance. What is important here is that the hardware used by Amazon [tomshardware.com], Google, and Microsoft is not all Nvidia. Hugging Face currently offers, depending on the provider, AWS Inferentia, AMD Instinct, Google TPU, Intel CPUs, and Nvidia accelerators, among other configurations.
OpenAI models, datasets, popular applications, and abilities to optimize and deploy AI models on different hardware make Hugging Face strategically important to Nvidia. On the one hand, the company can make the platform exclusively rely on its hardware, though this may face a backlash from the community, so this is something unlikely to happen in the short term (even assuming Nvidia is indeed set to buy Hugging Face). On the other hand, Nvidia wants open models to remain competitive with proprietary offerings from companies like Anthropic and OpenAI that may eventually get optimized for proprietary non-Nvidia hardware. Nvidia has been building its own Nemotron open models and has committed tens of billions of dollars to the effort. Furthermore, as Hugging Face grows, so is adoption of AI hardware in general and Nvidia hardware in particular.
Hugging Face is growing rapidly, but its revenue remains modest compared with the purchase price, according to The Information. The 10-year-old company recently reached approximately $150 million in annualized revenue, compared with about $100 million several months earlier, which puts Nvidia's price at roughly 80 times forward revenue, something that clearly highlights the strategic nature of the acquisition. Negotiations reportedly began after Hugging Face received acquisition interest elsewhere.
CEO and co-founder Clem Delangue said in June that paying subscribers doubled during the first half of 2026 and recently said the company was close to profitability. Demand has benefited from improving Chinese open models from Z.ai, Moonshot, and DeepSeek.
If Nvidia proceeds with the takeover, the transaction will be a part of Nvidia's increasingly aggressive investments across the AI ecosystem that spans from hardware to models to software. Last week, Nvidia agreed to pay $6 billion to license development technology from open-model developer Poolside and offered jobs to more than 100 employees. Nvidia also acquired Groq, Enfabrica, Essential AI, Illumex, and Kumo AI, just to name some.
