Hugging Face for $12.9B? Nvidia Eyes Open-Source AI's Home

27 August 2026 • Emma Lawson • 2 min read

$12.9B reported purchase price

$4.5B valuation back in 2023

$150M estimated annualized revenue

×80 reported revenue multiple

Would you pay $12.9 billion for a company with $150 million in revenue? Nvidia reportedly would. Per The Information, the chipmaker has agreed to buy Hugging Face, the platform that hosts a huge share of the world's open-source AI models, datasets and tools.

A Hugging Face Deal With No Signature Yet

Caution first: nothing is official. The Information describes an agreed purchase at $12.9 billion, while Business Insider says the talks could still fall apart.

Nvidia is very much a community, a platform-based company (...) Hugging Face fits perfectly within that.

Siddy Jobe, gérant de fonds chez Eonopolis

Neither company has commented. The timing raises eyebrows too: the rumor landed right on a record quarter, with $96.2 billion in revenue for Nvidia. Plenty of spare change for a shopping trip.

Why Nvidia Would Pay 80 Times Revenue

Hugging Face reportedly generates around $150 million in annualized revenue. A multiple of 80 times looks wild, until you follow the strategy.

OpenAI, Google, Amazon and Anthropic all build their own chips to cut their reliance on Nvidia GPUs. Open models, on the other hand, overwhelmingly run on Nvidia hardware, and the company already pushes its own Nemotron family. Own the hub, lock in the demand.

Idle Cloud Capacity, a Handy Outlet for Nvidia

The giant has guaranteed roughly $36 billion in cloud contracts for its customers. If that capacity sits idle, Hugging Face users would make ideal buyers. Convenient.

A Rejected Suitor Gets Its Revenge

Here is the twist: Hugging Face once turned down a $500 million Nvidia investment at a $7 billion valuation. The startup was worth $4.5 billion in 2023, in a round Nvidia had already joined.

Salesforce and Microsoft reportedly held talks as well. The company was founded in 2016 by three French entrepreneurs: Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf.

Can an Nvidia-Owned Hugging Face Stay Neutral?

Independence is the open question for developers' favorite repository. The platform, already shaken this summer when an OpenAI agent hacked its systems, would now belong to the king of GPUs. The open-source community watches very closely.