Nvidia 'agrees' to buy Hugging Face? Not quite - it's just talks, for now
Headlines say Nvidia has snapped up the open-source AI hub for $13 billion, but the actual reporting says the deal isn't done yet.
The claim versus the reporting
Depending on which headline you read this week, Nvidia has either “agreed to acquire” Hugging Face for $13 billion, or it’s merely been talking to the company about it. Only one of those is actually backed by reporting. Business Insider, citing a person familiar with the matter, says Nvidia and Hugging Face have held acquisition discussions “in recent weeks” that would value the open-source AI platform at more than $13 billion — but crucially, “the companies have not yet reached a deal, and the talks could still fall apart.” That’s a meaningfully different story to the tidy “Nvidia buys Hugging Face” framing doing the rounds online.
What’s actually known
Hugging Face is the de facto home of open-source AI — a repository hosting millions of models and datasets that developers, researchers and hobbyists build on daily. Nvidia is not a stranger here: it already backed Hugging Face’s $235 million funding round in 2023, which valued the company at $4.5 billion. According to the Financial Times, Hugging Face rebuffed a later $500 million investment offer from Nvidia that would have valued it at $7 billion, reportedly because it didn’t want a single investor with outsized influence over its direction.
Nvidia, meanwhile, has cash to burn. It says it has $18 billion earmarked for equity investments this fiscal year alone, on top of nearly $48 billion already tied up in private companies. Microsoft has also reportedly held talks with Hugging Face, though two sources told Business Insider those conversations are no longer active.
Why Nvidia would want this
The logic isn’t hard to follow. Hugging Face sits at the centre of the open-source AI ecosystem — control it, and you gain enormous influence over where developers point their workloads, potentially steering more of them towards Nvidia’s own chips. It’s the kind of vertical move the company has form for: build the hardware, then quietly shape the software and community layered on top of it.
That’s also precisely what worries some in the developer community. On Hacker News, where the story generated hundreds of comments, one recurring theme was scepticism about Nvidia’s open-source credentials, with users pointing to its history of steering developers towards proprietary CUDA drivers rather than open hardware access. Others pushed back, noting Nvidia has published its own training datasets and models on Hugging Face and has a stronger record of openness than many rival AI labs.
So who is actually affected right now
Nobody, yet. There’s no signed deal, no announced terms, and both companies have declined to comment. If talks do collapse — as Business Insider notes they could — nothing changes for the millions of developers, researchers and companies currently using Hugging Face’s platform. If a deal does eventually happen, the real question won’t be the price tag but whether Nvidia keeps the platform genuinely neutral, or gradually nudges it towards its own hardware and software stack — something critics already suspect is the long-term plan.
The takeaway
Right now this is a reported negotiation, not a completed acquisition — treat the more dramatic headlines with caution until an actual deal, if any, is confirmed by either company.