NVIDIA did not need to acquire another model lab. It needed the place developers already go when they do not want to live inside OpenAI or Anthropic.
NVIDIA has agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.9bn, The Information reported, citing a person familiar with the matter. Neither company has confirmed.
Hugging Face is where people go for open models and datasets. A lot of that work still runs on NVIDIA chips. If NVIDIA owns the site, the open route still sits inside NVIDIA’s world.
Hugging Face’s annualised revenue is about $150m. A $12.9bn price is roughly 86 times sales. Last year the company turned down a $500m NVIDIA investment that would have valued it at $7bn, the Financial Times reported. The bid landed in the same week as NVIDIA’s latest results: $96.2bn of quarterly revenue, $89bn of that from data centre, and supply commitments up to $279bn.
How is the cheque financed?
We still do not know whether NVIDIA is paying cash, shares, or both. That matters. Cash means they can write the cheque and move on. Shares mean Hugging Face has to be worth $12.9bn inside NVIDIA. Until there is a filing, the number is a reported price only.
Does Brussels treat this as a merger or a mood?
Hugging Face started in France. For a lot of European labs, it is simply where the open models live. NVIDIA makes the chips those models run on. That combination is the sort of thing Brussels tends to look at, even if nobody in California is asking.
Europe has spent two years talking about sovereign AI and open weights. It is awkward if the main open platform now belongs to the American chip firm everyone was trying not to depend on.
What happens to neutrality the day after close?
Hugging Face works because people treat it as neutral. They put models there, they download models there, and they do not assume the homepage is an advert for one chipmaker. That becomes harder to argue if NVIDIA owns the company.
Hugging Face has not commented on the reported deal. Nine days ago, it did post that the Hub had “surpassed 3 million models,” and that the community was heading toward “an open, distributed future where open AI is everywhere, for everyone.”
NVIDIA would not have to kick other chipmakers off the platform. It would only have to make its own stack the easy one. Most developers will follow whatever is simplest.
Chinese labs will keep putting open models on the Hub either way. The models can stay open. The platform would still have an owner.
Hugging Face has also had a messy few months, including a security incident involving an OpenAI model on its platform. That is already uncomfortable for a community site. It is more uncomfortable inside a listed company.
None of this makes NVIDIA the villain. The company sells the chips that most of these models run on. Buying the place those models are shared is an obvious next step. OpenAI and Anthropic now train and run models mostly on NVIDIA hardware. That is expensive, and it keeps them tied to one supplier. Both firms have been building custom chips so more of that work can run on chips they own.
If the deal goes through, the models will still be open. The platform will not be. That may be the distinction that matters.
What Happens Next?
If the deal is notified in Europe, it lands on Teresa Ribera’s desk, the commissioner who handles mergers, and on the competition department now run by Anthony Whelan. Henna Virkkunen will not decide the merger. She is the commissioner who fined Elon Musk’s X last year under the Digital Services Act, after which Musk published code on GitHub and turned “transparency” into a fight with Brussels.
That row is not the same as this case. NVIDIA is not X, and a merger file is not a content rule. It does change the mood. Brussels has just spent a year telling an American platform that “open” has to mean something. Hugging Face is the place Europe’s open models live. A $12.9bn sale to the company that already sells most of the chips will be read in that light.
The first official line, if there is one, will be bland: we have seen the reports; if a deal is notified, we will look at it. The real question is narrower. Can the Hub stay usable for hardware that is not NVIDIA’s?
Author: Andy Samu
See Also:
Why Is NVIDIA Buying Hugging Face for $12.9 Billion? – MRKT3.0
