Nvidia Buys Hugging Face for $12.93B but Says Developers Will Not Need Its Chips

American chip giant Nvidia has agreed to buy open‑source AI platform Hugging Face for £10.18 billion ($12.93 billion) and has moved to reassure coders it will not force them to run their software on Nvidia hardware, executives announced in Santa Clara on Thursday.

The multi‑billion‑pound purchase of Hugging Face follows an aggressive funding expansion across the computing sector by Nvidia, with executives taking immediate steps to reassure the open‑source community that access to foundational tools will remain neutral rather than tethered to Nvidia hardware.

Defending Open Architectures

The acquisition transfers ownership of a widely used software repository to the prominent chipmaker.

Headquartered in New York, Hugging Face serves as the primary digital home for collaborative artificial intelligence, hosting nearly three million open‑source models that engineers can download, inspect and modify without licensing restrictions.

When the company began operating in 2016, its primary product was a casual conversational chatbot aimed at teenagers.

The business later pivoted toward model hosting, eventually amassing £315 million ($400 million) in venture backing and securing a private valuation of £3.54 billion ($4.5 billion) during its 2023 investment round.

By 2021, the year before commercial chatbots transformed corporate strategy across global markets, the repository catalogued just 13,590 open models.

Both organisations have positioned themselves as defenders of open‑source artificial intelligence.

Nvidia and Hugging Face co‑signed a joint industry statement last month supporting open weights after rival technology companies, notably Anthropic and OpenAI, lobbied government officials against unrestricted distribution on national security grounds, claiming foreign competitors could repurpose open designs.

Clément Delangue, chief executive of Hugging Face, has been a vocal supporter of transparent systems amid growing industry debates over AI safety and data scraping.

Under the terms of the takeover, Hugging Face will retain structural autonomy, meaning developers can continue running code on rival hardware from AMD, Intel or Google Cloud without friction.

Corporate Billions Behind the Hugging Face Takeover

Nvidia is financing the acquisition using its substantial cash reserves. Armed with £155.1 billion ($197 billion) in current assets and quarterly profits approaching £47.2 billion ($60 billion), the Silicon Valley group has become a major financier in the artificial intelligence market.

Three years ago, quarterly profit stood at £4.88 billion ($6.2 billion). In its latest financial filing, quarterly revenue more than doubled compared to the previous year, reaching £75.76 billion ($96.22 billion).

During an analyst conference call on Wednesday, Colette Kress, chief financial officer at Nvidia, disclosed that the business had invested nearly £39.4 billion ($50 billion) into research labs building frontier models.

Kress described the outlays as 'a meaningful commitment,' whilst noting they represented 'a small fraction of our expected free cash flow.'

Circular Finance Doubts

The scale of corporate spending is prompting debate across Silicon Valley. Just last month, Nvidia partnered with six institutional investment groups to assemble £393.7 billion ($500 billion) in debt financing designed specifically to help customers purchase computing power.

The firm also pledged £82.7 billion ($105 billion) to underwrite one of the largest data facility projects globally, alongside direct equity injections into Safe Superintelligence and Thinking Machines Lab.

Some industry observers have expressed concern over the circular nature of these financing arrangements, noting that start‑ups often use the capital provided by tech companies to purchase chips and cloud services from those same investors.

Independent developers will likely monitor how Hugging Face's platform and code repositories operate following Nvidia's acquisition.