Nvidia’s reported $12.9 billion Hugging Face deal puts open-source AI neutrality in focus

Nvidia has reached an agreement to acquire Hugging Face, the company behind one of the largest repositories of publicly available AI models. Based on reports from The Information, the company will pay roughly around $12.9 billion to buy Hugging Face. However, Reuters has been unable to verify the information, while Nvidia and Hugging Face had not publicly commented.

But for the global AI community, the question of who owns Hugging Face is not just a matter of cost. Hugging Face is widely embraced as the open-source technology behind the AI philosophy. With the largest chipmaker in the world owning this technology, one must ask who controls one of the fundamental infrastructures in the AI system.

Hugging Face is not exactly a niche player. According to its Spring 2026 open-source report, the platform has amassed 13 million users and hosts over 2 million public models in 2025. These are the models that developers use irrespective of the chips and software they might want to use. If Nvidia acquires it, it would take over a public resource owned by a company whose GPUs those same developers either want to buy or choose to avoid depending on the pricing, availability and strategy.

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