An announcement already being hailed as one of the largest in the history of the AI industry: Nvidia has officially confirmed an agreement to acquire the developer platform Hugging Face. The deal is valued at an impressive $12.93 billion. Nvidia's CEO, Jensen Huang, personally called this move "a crucial milestone in the democratization of artificial intelligence."
Openness as a key principle
A critically important signal for the community: the official press release emphasizes that Hugging Face will retain its status as an open and neutral platform. Nvidia provides firm guarantees that developers will not be forced into proprietary infrastructure. Users will still be able to choose any models, frameworks, and cloud providers, including Nvidia's direct competitors.
"Creating or deploying applications through Hugging Face will not require the use of Nvidia computing resources," the company's official statement reads. This is a deliberate step aimed at preserving the trust of the platform's multi-million audience, which has historically valued its independence.
Numbers and scale of influence
The scale of the asset is impressive: Hugging Face's ecosystem is used daily by over 18 million developers and researchers. The platform hosts more than 3 million models, half a million datasets, and around 1 million applications. The corporate segment is also significant—over 200,000 companies use the service to find, fine-tune, and deploy AI solutions.
Nvidia emphasizes that it is no newcomer to this ecosystem: the corporation has already published over 500 models and 250 datasets under its own brand, effectively acting as the largest provider of open content for the platform. Nvidia's engineering resources and computing power, according to management's vision, are expected to enhance the reliability, security, and inference speed on the platform.
It is worth noting that the deal comes amid Nvidia's aggressive expansion: in August, the company already expanded its partnership with Amazon Web Services, agreeing to deploy an additional 2 million GPUs in the AWS cloud in 2027–2028.
My analysis: This is a strategic gambit. Nvidia is buying not just code and models, but a "social network" for AI developers and the main hub for distributing open weights. Control over Hugging Face means control over standards and the entry point for millions of engineers. The only question is whether Nvidia can maintain the balance between commercial interests and the status of an "honest broker" without alienating the community that constitutes the core value of this asset.