NVIDIA to Acquire Hugging Face for $12.93 Billion, Expanding Open-Source AI Ecosystem [Global AI Briefing]

[Financial News] NVIDIA has finalized an agreement to acquire Hugging Face, the world’s largest open-source artificial intelligence (AI) model distribution platform, for $12.93 billion (approximately 17 trillion won).
By directly acquiring Hugging Face, NVIDIA, which has been increasing its investment in expanding its open-source AI business, will gain access to the entire ecosystem, from AI hardware to the development and distribution of open-source AI.
This is expected to make NVIDIA not only a hardware provider to closed AI model developers such as OpenAI and Anthropic, but also a direct competitor in the AI model market.
On the 3rd (local time), NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang officially confirmed in an interview with CNBC that the company had signed an agreement to acquire Hugging Face. The deal will be finalized after approval from antitrust regulators in the United States, the European Union (EU), and other major jurisdictions.
NVIDIA has set a goal of obtaining regulatory approval by the first half of next year.

Hugging Face is a platform where developers can create, share, and distribute AI models, datasets, and applications. It is often referred to as the “GitHub of the AI industry.”
More than 18 million developers worldwide currently distribute over 3 million models, 1 million applications, and 500,000 datasets through Hugging Face.
In an interview with CNBC, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang emphasized, “Hugging Face will remain an open platform after the acquisition, and developers will be free to choose the models, frameworks, cloud services, and inference service providers they want,” adding, “NVIDIA computing will not be a mandatory requirement for using Hugging Face.”
The acquisition is seen as enabling NVIDIA to vertically expand its AI ecosystem beyond its dominance in hardware (GPUs) and into the AI model distribution and developer ecosystem layers.
In fact, at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2026 keynote in Las Vegas in January, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang highlighted the growth potential of open-source AI, making “open-source AI models” a central theme. He said, “One out of every four AI tokens generated today comes from an open model,” adding, “Open models are growing rapidly across various infrastructure environments, including enterprise clusters, regional clouds, and the edge.”
NVIDIA subsequently unveiled a broad lineup of its open-source model families, including NVIDIA Nemotron for agentic AI, Isaac GR00T for robotics, and Cosmos for physical AI.
As competition has recently become more pronounced between the closed AI model camp led by OpenAI and Anthropic and the open-source AI model camp centered on China, industry attention is focused on how NVIDIA, the leading AI hardware company, will affect competition in the AI model market by building a vertically integrated ecosystem for open-source models.
[email protected] Lee Gu-soon Reporter