Nvidia spent nearly 13 billion USD to buy 'GitHub of the AI world'
The agreement announced on September 3 officially brings the popular open source AI model, data set and tool storage platform under the umbrella of the world's largest AI chip manufacturer.
Hugging Face is an online platform founded in 2016, creating a space for AI developers to share projects and data with the community. Thanks to its rich library of open source machine learning models and strong community support features, the platform is considered the "GitHub of the AI world". Hugging Face currently hosts more than three million AI models, one million applications used by more than 18 million developers, and half a million data sets.
Hugging Face was once valued at $4.5 billion after a $235 million funding round in 2023 led by Salesforce Ventures, with participation from Google, Amazon, IBM and Nvidia. According to the Financial Times, in 2025, Hugging Face rejected an investment offer of $500 million from Nvidia because it did not want to be too dependent on one investor.
In an announcement on the company blog, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said Hugging Face will still maintain the nature of an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem. "Developers are free to choose the model, cloud infrastructure or server service provider they want. Developing or deploying products on Hugging Face does not require the use of Nvidia hardware." Mr. Huang said.
He also mentioned Nvidia's contributions, such as releasing more than 500 models and 250 open data sets on Hugging Face to encourage use by the global programmer community.
Clem Delangue, CEO and co-founder of Hugging Face, shared on Twitter that the platform needs more computing power, support and resources to scale. Therefore, the agreement with Nvidia is a strategic move. Despite possessing an important position, the startup's revenue source is quite modest. The latest financial report shows that the company's annual revenue only reached 150 million USD, very small compared to the price of nearly 13 billion USD that Nvidia spent.
For Nvidia, according to The Verge, the deal brings strategic advantages. Holding the leading open source AI platform helps consolidate its dominant position in artificial intelligence hardware, in the context that competitors such as OpenAI, Anthropic or Google are trying to develop their own chips. Nvidia can also leverage Hugging Face to distribute excess computing power to enterprise customers.
Jensen Huang strongly supports the open model. He once co-signed a letter calling for promoting an open model to strengthen America's position in the field of AI against international competitors. At the last quarter's financial report meeting, Nvidia said it had poured more than $50 billion into advanced AI laboratories, as well as signed a $6 billion agreement with programming startup Poolside to develop an open source model.
In July, Clem Delangue revealed that Nvidia's open model helped Hugging Face fend off cyberattacks after proprietary models failed to protect the platform.