Jensen Huang acquired Hugging Face for 12.9 billion USD

August 27, 2026, Zhidx News. According to a recent report from The Information, a person familiar with the matter revealed that NVIDIA has agreed to acquire Hugging Face for 12.9 billion US dollars (approximately 86.7 billion RMB).

Hugging Face is a globally recognized core platform in the global open source AI sector, widely known as "the GitHub of the AI industry", which provides open source AI model hosting services.

The report notes that amid the competition where open source model developers are striving to catch up with closed-source AI models from companies including Anthropic and OpenAI, this acquisition will grant NVIDIA control over a highly critical strategic asset.

NVIDIA executives believe that a large number of high-performing open source models will help consolidate its dominant position in the AI hardware field, as the open source ecosystem can counter those closed-source AI developers, who are currently working to develop their own AI server chips to reduce reliance on NVIDIA.

For this reason, NVIDIA has been ramping up its internal efforts to develop an open source AI model named Nemotron, and has pledged tens of billions of US dollars to build its own open source models.

Other AI server chip manufacturers including Google, Microsoft and Amazon have all previously made investments in Hugging Face.

In addition to hosting models, Hugging Face also helps AI model developers optimize models for different server hardware, and provides cloud services to deliver computing power support for these models in AI applications.

According to reports, Hugging Face's recent annualized revenue stands at 150 million US dollars, which means the price NVIDIA paid is about 80 times the startup's projected forward revenue, and this valuation level is quite high by current industry standards.

As market interest in open source AI has exploded, Hugging Face has achieved relatively rapid growth recently. Just a few months ago, its annualized revenue was only around 100 million US dollars. Hugging Face's customers pay a fixed monthly subscription fee, and pay extra fees based on the computing power resources they consume and the volume of data they store.

In June this year, Clem Delangue, co-founder and CEO of Hugging Face, stated in an interview with The Information that the number of paid subscribers of the company doubled in the first half of 2026. He also mentioned in a recent podcast that the company is "close to profitability".

The report states that for Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, the acquisition of Hugging Face marks the peak of a series of aggressive investments. He has long been committed to investing in NVIDIA's customers, chip users, and data center enterprises that cooperate with NVIDIA's customers, to lock in the binding of the company's hardware ecosystem.

From AI application developers such as Perplexity and OpenAI to companies that develop data center land and power resources, NVIDIA has poured tens of billions of US dollars into various industries.

Last week, NVIDIA signed a 6 billion US dollar agreement to obtain technical licenses for AI development tools from open source AI model developer Poolside, and plans to hire more than 100 of its employees, a move that has drawn close public attention.

Earlier this summer, NVIDIA also acquired Kumo AI and Essential AI to support the development of model training tools.

NVIDIA revealed at its earnings press conference today that the company currently holds 99 billion US dollars in equity investments, and has pledged to make additional investments of 25 billion US dollars by the end of July.

Hugging Face's early investors include Salesforce, Lux Capital and Addition. According to a person familiar with the relevant intentions, there used to be multiple potential buyers among Hugging Face's investors, including Salesforce.

Previously, Business Insider reported that NVIDIA was in negotiations with Hugging Face for a potential merger.

Today, the deal is about to be officially finalized.

This article is from the WeChat official account Zhidx, Author: Yun Peng, Editor: Mo Ying, published with authorization from 36Kr.