Nvidia Values Hugging Face at 2.9 Times Its 2023 Price

Nvidia agreed on Sept. 3 to pay $12.93 billion for Hugging Face, and $1 billion of that figure is not going to Hugging Face's shareholders at all. It is an equity retention pool set aside for Hugging Face employees who join Nvidia, according to Nvidia's announcement and reporting from Adweek. The remaining $11.9 billion goes to shareholders in cash. The deal is announced, not closed: it has triggered a Hart-Scott-Rodino premerger filing and is under review by antitrust regulators in the U.S. and the European Union, with both companies targeting a close in the first half of 2027, Adweek reported.

The retention pool is the real price of the deal

A $1 billion carve-out for staff, on top of a $6.9 billion enterprise-wide acquisition, tells you what Nvidia thinks it is actually buying. Hugging Face's Hub hosts more than 3 million models and 500,000 datasets used by more than 18 million developers, per Nvidia's own announcement, and that catalog is worthless if the engineers who maintain the infrastructure around it leave for a competitor the day the deal closes. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the two companies "will make AI more open, more capable and more accessible to people and institutions around the world," a line built to survive the deal's own legal review. Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue framed the sale differently, saying the open-source AI platform had reached a point that required "more resources, scale, and visibility," according to Adweek. Cofounder and chief scientist Thomas Wolf and Delangue built the company in 2016 in New York, naming it after the 🤗 emoji, per Fortune.

Nvidia tried to buy in twice before this

The $12.93 billion figure is not Hugging Face's first price tag from Nvidia. Nvidia participated in Hugging Face's 2023 Series D, a $235 million round that valued the company at $4.5 billion, according to TechCrunch's Aug. 26 report. In 2025, Nvidia offered a $500 million investment that would have valued Hugging Face at $7 billion; Hugging Face turned it down over concerns about the influence a single investor would gain, TechCrunch reported. The deal price now on the table is 2.9 times the 2023 mark and 1.8 times the rejected 2025 offer, a trajectory that moves faster than the company's own reported revenue: TechCrunch put Hugging Face's annualized revenue at roughly $150 million as of late August, up from about $100 million two months earlier.

1. 2023 Series D4.5 $B
2. 2025 rejected offer7 $B
3. 2026 Nvidia deal12.93 $B

Source: TechCrunch (Aug. 26, 2026) and Adweek (Sept. 3, 2026)

Nvidia has bought infrastructure this way before, just not always as a purchase

Set against Nvidia's own deal history, the Hugging Face structure is the more conventional of Nvidia's two recent AI infrastructure purchases. In December 2025, Nvidia struck a nearly $20 billion agreement with Groq that hired the chip startup's top engineers and licensed its designs without buying the company outright; Huang said at the time that Nvidia was "adding talented employees to our ranks and licensing Groq's IP" but was "not acquiring Groq as a company," according to Yahoo Finance's report on the deal. Hugging Face gets no such carve-out: Nvidia is buying the legal entity, the way it bought network-chip maker Mellanox for $6.9 billion in cash back in March 2019, a deal that took until April 2020 to close, according to Nvidia's own announcement of that acquisition. The Hugging Face price is nearly double what Mellanox cost six years earlier, and unlike Mellanox's networking hardware, Hugging Face's core asset is a community, not a product line Nvidia can fold into a chip roadmap.

That distinction is why Nvidia's public commitments read like hedges against the position Nvidia is now in. Huang said in the Sept. 3 announcement that "NVIDIA compute will not be required" to build or deploy models on the platform, and Hugging Face will keep supporting chips from AMD, Intel, Arm and other vendors alongside Nvidia's own. Whether that survives contact with a parent company that sells GPUs for a living is exactly the kind of promise a corporate blog post is built to make and not built to enforce. Nvidia was already the platform's largest single contributor before the deal, with more than 500 models and 250 open datasets posted under its own name, per its announcement, which cuts against the idea that ownership will meaningfully change what shows up on the Hub.

What the deal inherits along with the platform

Hugging Face's infrastructure has also been the target of a documented attack in July 2026: researchers have tied a swarm of automated accounts, similar to the OpenAI-linked flood that hit RubyGems in May, to a breach of Hugging Face's own systems in July. The company has also been racing to keep its inference stack current on new hardware paths, shipping 207 WebGPU kernels this month to make browser tabs a viable place to run models. Neither issue appears in Nvidia's or Hugging Face's public statements about the deal.

The next dates that matter are regulatory, not technical. The Hart-Scott-Rodino waiting period gives the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and Justice Department a window to challenge the deal before it can close, and the European Union review runs on its own clock. Until one of those clears, the $12.93 billion is a number two boards agreed to, not a number either company has banked.