Nvidia has struck a deal to purchase Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, according to a person with knowledge of the situation cited by The Information, in an account that emerged earlier this week. As of that reporting, the negotiations, which would put Hugging Face's worth above $13 billion, had not yielded a signed deal, and they may still collapse.

TechCrunch asked both Nvidia and Hugging Face for comment on the reported deal, and neither had responded as of publication. Nvidia's silence is considered notable, because the company has in the past moved quickly to publicly rebut reports it regards as inaccurate.

Launched in 2016, Hugging Face ranks among the best-known platforms where developers post and pull down AI models released as open source. In its own Spring 2026 open-source report, the company counted 13 million users and more than 2 million public models as of 2025.

The reported price sits far above the most recent valuation known for the company: a 2023 round brought Hugging Face $235 million and set its worth at $4.5 billion, with Nvidia among the backers. It also turned away a $500 million offer, explaining that it did not want one outsized backer with the power to influence its choices. Its revenue, The Information reported, had lately been running at roughly $150 million a year, having climbed from about $100 million only two months before.

OpenAI, Google, Amazon and Anthropic are each developing AI chips of their own in order to depend less on Nvidia, and threats from outside look increasingly capable of eroding Nvidia's command of the AI chip market, even taking into account how fast it rolls out new silicon. Openly released models are what buyers reach for when they want an alternative to those labs' closed systems, and Hugging Face is where that side of the industry gathers. Buying it would hand Nvidia the venue itself, just as developers working in the open try to close the gap with the proprietary labs.

The millions of publicly available models Hugging Face carries get used across Nvidia, AMD, Intel and other hardware ecosystems, which is why an owner that sells chips of its own would raise doubts about whether the site could stay an impartial venue for developers and rival chipmakers.

That same Hugging Face report singles out Nvidia as the largest Big Tech contributor to openly released AI over the preceding year — the ties between the two run deep already, without any change of ownership.

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