Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA), the chipmaking giant at the center of the artificial intelligence (AI) boom, has struck a deal to acquire Hugging Face, a popular platform for building and hosting AI models. 

• Nvidia will pay $11.9bn in cash to Hugging Face’s shareholders and offer an equity-based retention program of up to $1bn to the startup’s employees, totaling $12.9bn. 

• Founded in 2016, Hugging Face began as a chatbot app before pivoting to hosting AI models and datasets for developers worldwide. It has raised nearly $400mn from private investors, last valued at $4.5bn in a 2023 funding round.

• New York City-based Hugging Face was founded by French entrepreneurs Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond​, and Thomas Wolf.

Once again, Nvidia is deploying its massive cash pile to acquire a startup that cements its foothold in the AI industry. Last December, the chipmaking giant paid $20bn to buy assets from Groq, a startup that builds specialized chips used to run AI models efficiently.

Nvidia currently dominates the market for graphics processing units (GPUs), the specialized chips that power AI models by running loads of mathematical calculations simultaneously. It reported a staggering $120bn in net profit on $216bn in revenue in its last fiscal year ended January 2026. It has a $5.5 trillion market capitalization (as of writing), making it the world’s most valuable company.

• Acquiring Hugging Face gives Nvidia direct ownership of a platform that numerous developers use to train, test, and deploy both open-source and closed AI models. 

• Per Hugging Face, over 18 million developers host 3 million models and 500,000 datasets on its platform. Nvidia has released over 500 models on Hugging Face, making it the platform’s largest open-source contributor. 

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