NVIDIA has agreed to acquire Hugging Face for 12,930,300,000 dollars, founder and chief executive Jensen Huang announced, in one of the largest acquisitions ever recorded in the artificial intelligence sector. The deal hands NVIDIA control of the platform that anchors the open AI ecosystem. Hugging Face hosts more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets and 1 million applications, and serves a community of more than 18 million developers, researchers and creators. More than 200,000 companies use the platform to discover, evaluate, customize and deploy AI. ## The Openness Pledge At the center of the announcement is a commitment to preserve the platform's neutrality. "Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem," Huang wrote in the acquisition statement. "Developers will choose the models they want, the frameworks they want, the clouds and inference service providers they want and the computing platforms they want." Huang explicitly stated that NVIDIA compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face. The platform will continue to support open source and open weight models from across the ecosystem, from every model builder, and will maintain multi-cloud and multi-accelerator development and deployment so builders can use the hardware and infrastructure that best fit their work. The promise addresses the immediate concern of a community built on independence: a chipmaker with its own hardware business will now own the neutral ground where rival models and rival accelerators are compared. Huang framed the acquisition as continuity rather than change. "AI advances faster when people can build together," he wrote. ## A Decade in the Making The purchase price of 12.93 billion dollars reflects the strategic value of the community Hugging Face has assembled. Huang credited co-founders Clem Delangue, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf and their team for building "a vibrant home for the open model developer community" over the past decade. NVIDIA arrives as the platform's largest contributor of open models and data. The company has released more than 500 models on Hugging Face and more than 250 open datasets, and has contributed hundreds of open models and datasets as part of its stated position that open models, data and tools broaden access to AI. Huang recently coauthored an open letter on the importance of open weights to the AI economy, joined by leaders from across the industry. The letter argued that open weights broaden access to AI and help ensure that AI leadership is distributed across companies, institutions and communities. In his statement, Huang described the mechanics of the deal's origin. "I am honored that Clem came to me as he considered the next chapter of Hugging Face and believed NVIDIA would be a great home for the company, its community and the future of open models," he wrote. ## What NVIDIA Says It Will Build NVIDIA says its infrastructure, engineering and global reach will be used to improve platform reliability, safety, model evaluation, inference and deployment capabilities, while preserving the open ecosystem that made Hugging Face foundational. The company argues that as the opportunity for open models accelerates, Hugging Face can serve the global AI community at unprecedented scale. The statement also sketches the intended reach of open models. They allow startups, businesses, universities and public institutions to build on advanced capabilities without training every model from scratch, and to match the right model to the right job. Huang pointed to factories, hospitals, farms, classrooms and Main Street businesses as the environments where open models can extend AI's footprint. The Hugging Face team, brand and community move to NVIDIA as one unit. The company confirmed the platform will keep its iconic emoji brand, and Huang closed his announcement by telling the platform's millions of builders that NVIDIA cannot wait to build the future together with them.