Nvidia to buy Hugging Face for nearly $13 billion in big bet on open AI models

Nvidia will buy popular developer platform Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, betting that support for open AI models will drive future demand even as its biggest customers develop their own chips to reduce reliance on the semiconductor giant.

Nvidia will buy popular developer platform Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, betting that support for open AI models will drive future demand even as its biggest customers develop their own chips to reduce reliance on the semiconductor giant.

Shares of the company were slightly lower after the deal on Thursday, which ranks among its biggest ever.

The chipmaker is already a major open AI player in the U.S. with its widely used Nemotron model and vocal support for the technology. Acquiring Hugging Face will give it direct access to a platform developers use to collaborate, test and share tools, potentially providing valuable insight and data that could help it narrow the technology gap with top American and Chinese labs.

Demand for open-weight models has surged from businesses balking at the steep bill of deploying the technology, with Chinese companies such as DeepSeek and Z.ai emerging as crucial players with models that can match the best from the United States in tasks including generating computer code at a lower cost.

That surge has fueled fears that some American firms could become reliant on Beijing’s models even as both countries race to dominate a technology they see as crucial to their future.