NVIDIA has reached an agreement to acquire the open-source AI platform Hugging Face for $12.93 billion. This transaction marks the largest venture-backed technology acquisition in the history of New York City, surpassing the previous record set by the sale of Jet.com to Walmart for $3.3 billion in 2016.
Hugging Face was founded in 2016 by Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf. Prior to this acquisition, the company had raised $395.2 million in equity funding from a broad list of investors, including Sequoia Capital, Salesforce Ventures, Google, Amazon, IBM, Intel, and AMD.
The platform currently hosts over 3 million models, 500 000 datasets, and 1 million applications, serving more than 18 million developers and over 200 000 companies. Following the deal, which was announced by NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang on September 3, 2026, the entire team will join NVIDIA.
Hugging Face will continue to operate as an independent and neutral entity. Jensen Huang confirmed that the platform will remain multi-cloud and multi-accelerator, with no requirement for users to utilize NVIDIA compute hardware. The company aims to grow its user base to 200 million AI builders.
