Nvidia Reportedly Agrees to Pay $12.9 Billion for the Central Hub of the Open-Source AI World, a Company With Just $150 Million in Revenue

NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA | NVDA Price Prediction) has reportedly agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, according to a report from The Information that was subsequently picked up by Reuters, CNBC and TechCrunch. Hugging Face generates roughly $150 million in annualized revenue, so NVDA would be paying approximately 86 times revenue. Neither company has confirmed the reporting, no contract has been signed, and deal structure, cash-versus-stock mix and any regulatory review remain undisclosed.

A multiple this high on a business this small reflects what the platform represents inside the open-source AI stack.

What Hugging Face Actually Is

Founded in 2016, Hugging Face is widely described as the “GitHub of AI”: a hub where developers and companies share, download and publish open-source AI models, datasets and tools. It also operates infrastructure that lets developers run those models on rented cloud and compute, making it both a repository and a deployment and inference layer. In an AI market otherwise dominated by closed labs, it is the central and relatively vendor-neutral home for the open-model community.

Fast-Growing Revenue, Not Yet Profitable

Hugging Face’s roughly $150 million annualized revenue is up from roughly $100 million about two months earlier. CEO Clem Delangue has described the company as “close to profitability,” but it is not yet profitable. Its last private valuation was $4.5 billion, set in a 2023 round that raised $235 million.

From Rejected Minority Bid to Reported Full Buyout

The relationship has escalated in three stages. In 2023, NVIDIA participated in Hugging Face’s funding round as one of several investors. In late 2025, NVIDIA offered a $500 million minority investment that would have valued Hugging Face at $7 billion; leadership rejected it because they did not want a single dominant investor with outsized influence. Now, less than a year later, the reported figure is a $12.9 billion full acquisition.

Why NVIDIA Wants the Developer Layer

NVIDIA’s largest customers are building their own silicon. OpenAI and Broadcom unveiled benchmark claims for their custom “Jalapeño” inference chip at the Hot Chips conference on Aug. 25, 2026, asserting it outperforms NVIDIA’s Blackwell-generation rack systems (see our coverage). Owning Hugging Face is reported as a way to keep developers building and deploying models in ways that favor NVIDIA’s hardware and software stack, and to give NVIDIA a credible path back into cloud through Hugging Face’s model-deployment and compute-rental platform.

The check is small against NVIDIA’s scale. The company reported $96.22 billion in revenue for Q2 fiscal 2027 and guided to $108.0 billion for the current quarter, with approximately $99.0 billion remaining under its share-repurchase authorization. CEO Jensen Huang told analysts, “nearly all open models run on NVIDIA”. Buying the venue where those models are hosted removes ambiguity about that claim.

Independence Question Looms Over the Deal

Hugging Face’s value to the open-source community depends on its perceived neutrality across hardware and cloud vendors. Ownership by a chip company with direct financial interest in developer lock-in creates tension with that positioning. Delangue, in the context of a cyberattack on Hugging Face’s systems around June/July 2026, argued that open models matter because researchers can examine and act on security threats “without asking anyone’s permission.” That is the ethos being sold.

What to watch: whether the reporting hardens into a signed agreement, whether terms and any regulatory review are disclosed, and how the open-model developer base reacts before any close. Talks could still collapse.

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