NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang announced September 3 that NVIDIA had agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12,930,300,000. The definitive agreement was entered into on September 2, according to an SEC (U.S. securities regulator) filing, which details an approximately $11.9 billion payment to Hugging Face stockholders and up to approximately $1 billion in equity-based employee retention. The transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2027, subject to customary closing conditions and regulatory approvals. NVIDIA says the deal will strengthen its position in open-source and open-weight AI while Hugging Face remains an open platform supporting different models, frameworks, cloud providers, inference services, computing platforms, model builders, and hardware accelerators. The platform is used by more than 18 million developers, researchers and creators, hosts more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets and 1 million applications, and is used by more than 200,000 companies. The acquisition also has implications for decentralized AI (AI development distributed across networks), including blockchain-based projects such as Bittensor, because it would place a major open-model platform under NVIDIA’s ownership. NVIDIA said its own computing will not be required to build or deploy through Hugging Face, and that the platform will receive additional infrastructure and engineering resources. The deal follows NVIDIA’s backing of a $35 billion cloud agreement connected to a Texas data center built by former Bitcoin miner Hut 8, and comes after a July Hugging Face security incident involving unauthorized access to limited internal datasets and several service credentials. NVIDIA has not linked the acquisition to that incident. Regulatory requirements could affect models or datasets available through Hugging Face and require changes to the platform, making NVIDIA’s openness commitments relevant as regulators review the transaction.