Nvidia has agreed to acquire Hugging Face, the open-source AI model repository, for about $12.9 billion, The Information first reported, with Business Insider and Forbes independently confirming the talks.
The deal would value Hugging Face at more than $13 billion. It has not been signed and could still fall through, Business Insider reported. Neither Nvidia nor Hugging Face has commented publicly, which TechCrunch noted is unusual for Nvidia, a company that typically moves quickly to dispute reports it considers inaccurate.
The price marks a sharp jump from Hugging Face's $4.5 billion valuation in its August 2023 Series D round, when Nvidia contributed $235 million, according to Forbes. Hugging Face had turned down a later offer of $500 million from Nvidia that would have valued the company at $7 billion, saying it did not want a dominant investor shaping its decisions, TechCrunch reported.
Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang has publicly defended open-weight AI models in recent months, saying they "strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty," according to Forbes.
Hugging Face hosts the model weights, datasets and libraries a large share of open-source AI tooling depends on. If Nvidia ends up owning the platform outright, every startup pulling a model from its hub or building infrastructure around its APIs is relying on a chipmaker's decisions, not a neutral host.