Washington (United States) (AFP) – The semiconductor giant Nvidia will acquire the artificial intelligence platform Hugging Face for an amount of 12.9 billion dollars, the company announced this Thursday in a statement.
First modification: 09/03/2026 - 16:29
Founded in 2016 in New York by three French entrepreneurs, Hugging Face promotes open models, which can be downloaded and modified, in contrast to closed models such as those of its rivals OpenAI or Anthropic.
"Together, we will expand Hugging Face's platform, strengthen its infrastructure, and expand access to AI for developers and institutions around the world," Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in announcing the purchase.
The price represents a notable increase over the $7 billion valuation that formed the basis for initial negotiations with Nvidia late last year, according to US media reports.
The arrival of AI agents capable of performing tasks autonomously has caused demand for computing power to skyrocket.
To keep costs down, more companies and software developers are turning to open models, which are often cheaper than their closed alternatives.
Huang noted that Nvidia would not change Hugging Face's core model with the acquisition.
"Hugging Face will continue to support open source models," he said. It will remain "an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem," he emphasized.
According to Nvidia's statement, the AI platform has more than 18 million users, who have created more than 3 million models and more than one million applications.
Hugging Face made headlines in July when two OpenAI models broke into its internal systems without being authorized to do so.
The incident fueled concerns that AI giants may not be able to keep their own technology under control, with similar episodes reported by Anthropic and Moonshot AI.
Nvidia is primarily known for its GPUs, specialized chips originally designed for high-speed video game rendering, which have more recently become the powerhouse for chatbots and other AI tools.
© 2026 AFP
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