The largest manufacturer of chips for artificial intelligence has officially confirmed the acquisition of the leading developer platform Hugging Face. The deal amount reached a colossal $12.93 billion. This is a strategic move that radically reshapes the balance of power in the AI infrastructure market.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang personally announced the deal, emphasizing the importance of open models for the future of the industry. According to him, open model weights enhance security, accelerate innovation, and provide sovereignty to developers, startups, and entire countries.
Key terms and preservation of neutrality
Contrary to skeptics' expectations, Nvidia states that the platform will remain fully open. Moreover, the company provides firm guarantees: developers will not be forced to use proprietary infrastructure. Hugging Face users will retain the freedom to choose models, frameworks, cloud providers, and computing platforms. Using Nvidia GPUs will not become a mandatory condition for working with the service.
Hugging Face will continue to support models from various developers, including open-weight projects. At the same time, the integration of Nvidia's engineering resources and computing power should significantly improve the platform's reliability, model evaluation quality, and inference speed.
Scale of the ecosystem
The numbers are impressive: the platform is used by more than 18 million developers and researchers. The service's catalog hosts over 3 million models, 500,000 datasets, and 1 million applications. Corporate clients — more than 200,000 companies — use Hugging Face to find, customize, and deploy AI solutions.
Notably, Nvidia itself has long been a key contributor to the ecosystem, having published more than 500 models and 250 datasets under its own brand. This makes the deal a logical continuation of a long-standing partnership rather than an attempt to seize someone else's business.
Context of expansion
This acquisition is only part of Nvidia's large-scale strategy to dominate the AI sector. Recall that in August, the corporation expanded its collaboration with Amazon Web Services, agreeing to deploy an additional two million GPUs in the AWS cloud in 2027–2028. Nvidia also recently invested $3.5 billion in MediaTek, strengthening its position in edge computing.
My analysis: The acquisition of Hugging Face is not just the purchase of a popular service. It is Nvidia's attempt to take the place of an "operating system" for the entire AI community by controlling a key node in model distribution. However, maintaining the platform's neutrality is a critically important condition. If Nvidia even hints at advantages for its own hardware, the developer community could quickly turn away from the platform. Here, the issue of trust is more acute than the issue of technology.