NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang announced September 3 that the company had agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12,930,300,000. NVIDIA’s SEC filing shows the definitive agreement was entered into on September 2 and includes an approximately $11.9 billion purchase price for 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 regulatory approvals.
The acquisition would expand NVIDIA’s presence in open-source and open-weight AI. NVIDIA said more than 18 million developers, researchers and creators use Hugging Face, which hosts more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets and 1 million applications, while more than 200,000 companies use the platform. NVIDIA and Hugging Face have already worked together on open AI models and datasets. Huang said NVIDIA is the largest contributor of open models and data to Hugging Face, with more than 500 models and 250 open datasets published on the platform.
The deal also has relevance for crypto because Hugging Face is used by projects working on decentralized AI (DeAI), including blockchain-based AI networks such as Bittensor. NVIDIA’s ownership of the platform could also raise questions around the concentration of AI infrastructure and access to open models.
NVIDIA Says Hugging Face Will Remain Open
NVIDIA said Hugging Face will remain an open platform following the acquisition. Developers will continue to choose the models, frameworks, cloud providers, inference services and computing platforms they use, while NVIDIA said its own compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face.
The company also said Hugging Face will continue supporting open-source and open-weight models from different model builders and maintain multi-cloud and multi-accelerator development and deployment.
Those commitments are central to the structure of the deal because Hugging Face’s platform supports models and tools that run across different hardware and infrastructure providers. NVIDIA said the acquisition will provide Hugging Face with additional infrastructure and engineering resources while maintaining the platform’s open ecosystem.
Why the Deal Matters to Decentralized AI
The acquisition also brings NVIDIA deeper into an area that overlaps with the decentralized-AI, or DeAI, sector. Blockchain-based AI projects such as Bittensor (TAO) seek to distribute parts of AI development and infrastructure across decentralized networks rather than relying entirely on centralized providers.
Hugging Face plays a different role, operating as a centralized platform where developers can upload, share, evaluate, and deploy AI models, datasets, and applications. The NVIDIA acquisition therefore puts a major open-model platform under the ownership of one of the largest companies in AI infrastructure.
That does not by itself change how DeAI networks operate, but it raises a broader question for the sector: how much of the AI development stack should be controlled by individual companies, and how much should remain distributed across developers, infrastructure providers and communities.
NVIDIA has sought to address that issue directly in its acquisition announcement. Huang said open models can broaden access to AI and help distribute AI development across companies, institutions and communities.
NVIDIA’s Growing AI Infrastructure Footprint
The Hugging Face acquisition follows other recent moves by NVIDIA to expand its position across AI infrastructure. The company recently backed a $35 billion cloud agreement whose computing capacity runs through a Texas data center built by former Bitcoin miner Hut 8, extending a broader shift among crypto miners toward AI infrastructure.
The Crypto Times previously reported on the NVIDIA-backed agreement and its connection to Hut 8’s transition from Bitcoin mining infrastructure toward AI data-center capacity.
The Hugging Face transaction adds another layer to NVIDIA’s AI strategy by giving the company a larger role in the software, model and developer ecosystem alongside its existing computing business.
Hugging Face Security Incident Adds Another Dimension
The acquisition also comes after a July security incident at Hugging Face involving an autonomous AI agent system. Hugging Face disclosed that the intrusion resulted in unauthorized access to a limited set of internal datasets and several service credentials. The company said it found no evidence of tampering with public, user-facing models, datasets or Spaces, and said its software supply chain remained clean.
Hugging Face said the intrusion began through vulnerabilities in its dataset-processing pipeline and involved an autonomous agent framework carrying out thousands of actions across short-lived sandboxes. The company subsequently fixed the vulnerabilities, rebuilt affected infrastructure and rotated credentials.
The incident highlights the security challenges facing platforms that host models, datasets and AI development tools, although NVIDIA has not linked the acquisition to the security incident.
What Happens Next
The transaction is agreed but has not closed. As per the SEC filing, NVIDIA expects it to close in the first half of 2027, subject to customary closing conditions and required regulatory approvals.
The filing also notes that regulatory requirements could affect the models or datasets available through Hugging Face and could require changes to the platform, potentially affecting the expected benefits of the acquisition.
For developers and the broader open-source AI ecosystem, NVIDIA’s stated commitments to platform openness will therefore be an important part of the acquisition as regulators review the transaction and the companies move toward closing.
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