Nvidia in talks to buy Hugging Face at a valuation above $13 billion

Nvidia is negotiating to acquire Hugging Face in a deal that would value the open-source AI platform at more than $13 billion, according to Business Insider. Citing a person familiar with the matter, the outlet reports that acquisition conversations have taken place over the past few weeks, but the two sides have not reached an agreement and the talks could still fall apart. A Hacker News post surfacing the story framed it as a completed deal, though Business Insider's own reporting describes an active negotiation rather than a signed transaction. Neither company responded to requests for comment, the outlet said.

Deep pockets and a complicated history

The reported figure would make this one of Nvidia's biggest deals to date, and the company has the balance sheet for it. On Wednesday, Nvidia said it has $18 billion committed to equity investments for the rest of its fiscal year, on top of $47.9 billion it already holds in private companies, according to Business Insider. The chipmaker has been accelerating its dealmaking with that cash pile.

Nvidia is already a Hugging Face backer, having joined a $235 million funding round in 2023 that valued the startup at $4.5 billion. The relationship has seen friction before: the Financial Times previously reported that Hugging Face rejected a $500 million investment offer from Nvidia late last year — one that would have valued it at $7 billion — because it did not want a dominant shareholder able to sway its decisions. An outright acquisition at more than $13 billion would settle that question decisively in Nvidia's favor.

Microsoft also met with Hugging Face, Business Insider reports, but two people familiar with the situation said those discussions are no longer ongoing.

The neutrality problem

Hugging Face sits at the center of the open-source AI ecosystem. It hosts millions of models and datasets that developers build on, functioning as the de facto public library for open machine learning. According to Business Insider, ownership would hand Nvidia a larger foothold among those developers and could steer more computing workloads toward its chips.

But the same report highlights the tension: much of the platform's usefulness rests on being neutral ground. Hugging Face distributes models from across the industry and supports hardware from Nvidia competitors such as AMD and Intel. Under Nvidia's control, that neutrality could become harder to sustain — a platform perceived as an extension of one chipmaker is a less comfortable home for everyone else's models.

Why it matters

If the talks conclude, the deal would consolidate two foundational layers of the AI industry: a leading supplier of AI accelerators and the primary distribution hub for open models. Developers will watch for signs of whether Hugging Face remains vendor-neutral infrastructure or begins tilting toward its new owner's ecosystem, and chip rivals would face a key distribution channel partly controlled by a competitor. The valuation trail also tells its own story — $4.5 billion in 2023, a rejected $7 billion offer last year, and more than $13 billion on the table now — showing how sharply the center of the open-source AI world has appreciated. Even unsigned, the negotiation signals where AI consolidation is heading: cash-rich hardware makers buying deeper into the software layers that generate demand for their silicon.