Nvidia acquires open-source AI platform Hugging Face for $12.9bn

GamesIndustry.biz reports Nvidia has acquired Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, a move that could reshape how developers access open AI tooling. Nvidia says the platform will stay open-source and that developers will not be forced onto Nvidia hardware or services, which matters for teams trying to keep their pipelines flexible.

The deal is valued at about $11.9 billion in cash to Hugging Face investors, with up to $1 billion more in stock-based incentives. Amazon, AMD, and Intel are also investors, underscoring how central Hugging Face has become to the broader AI ecosystem rather than any single vendor stack.

Nvidia president and CEO Jensen Huang said the company wants to improve Hugging Face’s infrastructure for developers and organizations worldwide, calling out reliability, safety, model evaluation, inference, and deployment. For game developers experimenting with AI-assisted content, NPC tooling, or build-time automation, that could mean better hosted services and more mature deployment paths.

Hugging Face was founded in 2016 in New York City by Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf. Delangue said the platform needed more resources, scale, and visibility, and described Nvidia as a strong fit. Nvidia is already Hugging Face’s biggest contributor, with more than 500 models and 250 open datasets released through the platform.