Nvidia has agreed to acquire New York City-based AI company Hugging Face for a whopping $12,930,300,000.

Hugging Face, which many describe as a sort of GitHub for AI models, is home to an expansive open-source library of AI tools. Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang describes Hugging Face as “a vibrant home for the open model developer community.”

“More than 18 million developers, researchers and creators use Hugging Face to share more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets and 1 million applications. More than 200,000 companies use the platform to discover, evaluate, customize and deploy AI,” Huang continues.

Despite spending nearly $13 billion to acquire Hugging Face, Huang says Nvidia will keep Hugging Face alive as an open platform.

“Hugging Face will continue to support open source and open weight models from across the ecosystem, from every model builder. It will continue to support multi-cloud and multi-accelerator development and deployment, so builders can use the hardware and infrastructure that best fit their work,” Huang promises.

Nvidia has demonstrated a longstanding commitment to open AI models and has been the largest contributor of open models and data to the Hugging Face community since early 2025. As of today, Nvidia has released more than 500 models and over 250 open datasets on Hugging Face. Many other familiar companies also release open data on Hugging Face, including Meta, Microsoft, and AMD, to name a few.

Huang says open models enable startups, businesses, universities, and public institutions to build more powerful AI models without training every model entirely from scratch.

“That is how AI can advance safely, strengthen cybersecurity and sovereignty, accelerate innovation, and reach factories, hospitals, farms, classrooms and Main Street businesses around the world,” Huang explains.

Nvidia has benefited greatly from the proliferation of AI models and technology, which require the very chips Nvidia makes. In the past five years, propelled significantly by AI growth, Nvidia’s stock price has increased by nearly 900 percent. The company’s market cap has grown from around $300 billion to $5.5 trillion at the time of writing. Nvidia’s stock rose from just shy of $23 per share to nearly $228. The more accessible AI models are to users, the more in demand Nvidia’s chips become.

“As the opportunity for open models accelerates, Hugging Face can serve the global AI community at unprecedented scale. Nvidia’s infrastructure, engineering and global reach can help improve platform reliability, safety, model evaluation, inference and deployment capabilities, while preserving the open ecosystem that made Hugging Face foundational,” Huang says.

Image creditsNvidia