“Hugging Face will remain an open platform”: Nvidia strikes $12.9B deal for the ‘GitHub of AI’

Nvidia has confirmed that it’s agreed to acquire Hugging Face in a mammoth $12.9 billion deal that will bring one of the AI industry’s most important open-model platforms under the auspices of the world’s dominant AI chipmaker — and, with a market cap of well over $5 trillion, the most valuable company on Earth.

When reports first emerged in August that Nvidia was lining up a gargantuan bid for what has often been described as the “GitHub of AI Models,” concerns quickly surfaced over what the deal could mean for the platform’s openness and hardware neutrality. As The New Stack reported at the time, Hugging Face’s value lies partly in giving developers a neutral place to find and deploy open models across Nvidia, AMD, Intel and cloud accelerators — raising the question of what happens if that platform is owned by just one of them.

Keeping Hugging Face open

That, ultimately, is why Nvidia founder, president and CEO Jensen Huang is going to great lengths to allay fears that Hugging Face could become a vehicle for steering developers toward Nvidia’s own hardware and software stack.

“Nvidia compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face.”

In the official announcement on Thursday, Huang makes a series of explicit promises around neutrality, noting that Hugging Face would “remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem,” continue to support multiple clouds and accelerators, while stressing that “Nvidia compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face.”

“Hugging Face will continue to support open source and open weight models from across the ecosystem, from every model builder,” Huang writes. “It will continue to support multi-cloud and multi-accelerator development and deployment, so builders can use the hardware and infrastructure that best fit their work.”

Indeed, it’s clear Nvidia had clocked the concerns around the impending acquisition. The word “open” appears no fewer than 19 times in Huang’s relatively short announcement, underlining just how central that reassurance is to Nvidia’s pitch for the deal.

Huang also points to a recent open letter on open weights that he co-signed alongside executives and researchers from across the AI industry, including those from Hugging Face. The letter argued that open-weight models are critical to broadening access to AI, strengthening competition and giving developers more control over how models are deployed and adapted.

For what it’s worth, Nvidia has been pushing hard into open-weight AI itself, including through its Nemotron models and a broader effort to make frontier-class models easier to run locally. Hugging Face co-founder and CEO Clément Delangue went so far as to call Nvidia the “King of American open-source AI” a few months ago, pointing to its growing collection of public models, datasets and Spaces on Hugging Face.

In the wake of the announcement on Thursday, Delangue doubled down on that position in a fresh post announcing the deal, arguing that Hugging Face has reached the point where keeping open-source AI competitive would require substantially more resources.

“It needs more compute, more support, more collaboration and more visibility.” – Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue

“10 years after starting Hugging Face, open-source AI is at an inflection point,” Delangue writes on LinkedIn. “Thanks to the community, we’ve shown that it can be a complement, and even an alternative, to closed-source APIs. But for it to happen at larger scale, it needs more compute, more support, more collaboration and more visibility.”

He adds that Nvidia has committed to backing Hugging Face while keeping the platform open, independent and compute-agnostic, with the founders and existing team staying on.

“Together, we think we can make open source the default way to build AI,” Delangue writes, setting out a goal of helping 100 million AI builders “own their intelligence rather than rent it.”

GitHub as a historical precedent

However, there is some historical precedent for taking such assurances with a degree of caution. When Microsoft bought GitHub for $7.5 billion in 2018, it similarly promised that the platform would remain independent and open. GitHub largely retained that openness, though Microsoft’s later use of public GitHub code to help train the proprietary, paid Copilot service sparked a backlash among factions of the open-source community.

In truth, that obvious comparison may actually understate Nvidia’s challenge. In recent analysis for Forbes, technology analyst Janakiram MSV argues that neutrality at Hugging Face has a hardware dimension that GitHub never had to contend with. Hugging Face maintains integrations spanning AWS Trainium and Inferentia, Google TPUs, Intel Gaudi, AMD Instinct and other accelerators. Under Nvidia ownership, continued support for those rival chips becomes a real test of just how neutral the platform will remain in the long run.

Not a done deal yet

As for the acquisition itself, well, it’s not over the line quite yet. In a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Nvidia notes that it expects the deal to close in the first half of 2027, subject to customary closing conditions and regulatory approvals. Given Nvidia’s lofty position in AI infrastructure and Hugging Face’s role as a major distribution point for open models, those approvals are unlikely to be a mere formality. Nvidia’s filing also flags the possibility that future regulation around open-source AI could affect Hugging Face’s operations or increase compliance costs.

“Hugging Face [will] continue to permit model makers, developers, and users to upload and download models and datasets of their choosing and to support other silicon vendors.”

Notably, Nvidia also uses its SEC filing to reaffirm its neutrality commitments, stating that under the commitment, “Hugging Face would continue to permit model makers, developers, and users to upload and download models and datasets of their choosing and to support other silicon vendors.”

Of the roughly $12.9 billion headline price, about $11.9 billion will go to Hugging Face stockholders, with up to $1 billion earmarked for equity-based retention awards for employees joining Nvidia.

And while the headline price is usually rounded to $12.9 billion, the actual figure is an oddly specific $12,930,300,000. That’s no accident either, as Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf alludes to in a LinkedIn post. For those still in the dark, 129303 is the decimal Unicode value for the 🤗 emoji, while #129303 is a green color code nodding to Nvidia’s branding.

A neat little Easter egg buried inside what can only be described as one of the biggest AI deals of the year.

The post “Hugging Face will remain an open platform”: Nvidia strikes $12.9B deal for the ‘GitHub of AI’ appeared first on The New Stack.