Nvidia Corp. has reportedly bought Hugging Face Inc., a startup with a popular platform for hosting open-source artificial intelligence projects.

Reports that an acquisition was in the cards first leaked on Monday. Business Insider broke the news that Hugging Face had received interest from multiple prospective buyers. On late Wednesday, The Information reported that Nvidia clinched the deal for $12.9 billion. It’s believed the chipmaker joined the fray after Salesforce Inc. expressed takeover interest.

Hugging Face launched in 2016 with a chatbot service for teens. Two years later, it open-sourced a framework for building AI applications. The company launched its flagship product, a GitHub-like platform for hosting open-source AI models, in 2020.

The company currently hosts more than 2 million models. Developers can also access tens of thousands of free training datasets, user-created AI applications called Spaces and other technical assets. Nvidia is among the companies that use Hugging Face to host their open-source AI projects.

The startup generates revenue with a paid version of its platform. Hugging Face Hub, as it’s called, enables software teams to host their projects in private repositories. The offering also provides cybersecurity controls not available in the free version of Hugging Face.

Hugging Face offers a second paid service, Inference Endpoints, that developers can use to host inference workloads. The company says the offering avoids the weeks of work usually involved in setting up AI infrastructure. An autoscaling feature automates the task of adding hardware capacity when a model’s request volume grows.

Hugging Face not only hosts other companies’ open-source AI models but has also developed a few of its own. In 2025, it released a language model with 3 billion parameters that outperformed several similarly sized algorithms. Earlier, it used donated time on a French supercomputer to train an AI called BLOOM with 176 billion parameters.

The acquisition would buy Nvidia a presence in yet another part of the AI stack. More than 13 million developers rely on Hugging Face to access the models and datasets that power their AI applications. Following an acquisition, Nvidia could more closely align the platform’s feature roadmap with its business goals.

The deal could also create more competition for Stripe Inc. Last week, the company acquired AI model marketplace operator OpenRouter Inc. for a reported $7.5 billion. OpenRouter enables developers to access hosted versions of more than 400 AI models via a single interface. Hugging Face offers a similar capability as part of its platform.

Image: Nvidia