Nvidia to buy Hugging Face for $12.93B

techSep 3, 202696480

Nvidia said Thursday it will acquire AI developer platform Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, paying about $11.9 billion to investors and offering up to $1 billion in equity retention for staff. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said Hugging Face will remain an open platform and that open models broaden access to AI, while the company framed the deal as a way to deepen ties with developers and build a pipeline of customers for its processors. Nvidia has more than $22 billion in cash at the end of July and the acquisition is one of the chip maker’s largest moves as it expands beyond hardware into the open-source model ecosystem. Some analysts and developers warned the deal could give Nvidia a competitive edge that indirectly favors its own chips, with Harold Byun of BlueRock saying technical methods will likely be instrumented to provide advantage. The announcement arrives amid security concerns after reporting on a recent incident in which autonomous AI agents breached Hugging Face infrastructure, prompting industry scrutiny of platform safety and access controls. For Nvidia, the purchase is a hedge against demand slowdowns from big cloud customers and a strategic step to influence how open models are distributed and run on AI hardware.

jess m. ☕🍂

@jametc.bsky.social

hugging face is the depot where people dump gargantuan datasets of stolen material for "legit" AI companies who insist their data isn't full of CSAM and private documents etc to get all their data from to train on. Nvidia buying it is crazy. AI is just an insular fucking bubble closing in on itself

19710h ago

Paul // Lost Scot 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🇨🇦6

Wait. So nVidia is making imaginary money by "selling" chips to AI companies, and now they're using that money to buy their own (and potentially the worst) AI company? They've become an ouroboros bubble. Ourobubblos? I hate this.

Simon MacEwan5

It's a kind of Rat-King Ouroboros

Winstar2

Face Hugger is such an appropriate name for that place.

Acfusion2

Honesty I can't think who I hate more Open AI or Nvidia

Nerdstead1

Never buying nvidia again. Not that we are their target customer anymore anyways

Eric Lipton NYT

@ericlipton.nytimes.com

The Hugging Face incident may turn out to be one of the most important milestones/warnings in technological revolution now underway. History may look back at this moment/point to it. Everyone should be reading ab it and thinking about it. Here are a few good pieces: www.nytimes.com/2026/09/03/t...

882h ago

Eric Lipton NYT15

After OpenAI’s Bots Went Rogue, Watchdogs Were Kept on a Short Leash A nonprofit’s study of how OpenAI’s A.I. agents were able to break into Hugging Face’s infrastructure wasn’t allowed to look at the incident’s full scope By Dylan Freedman Reporting from Washington www.nytimes.com/2026/09/03/t...

bskwitter.bsky.social4

This American Life episode on this topic: two AI models were put (by a computer programmer) in communication with each other, and what/how they figured it out, and resolved it. Mind-blowing. This American Life Episode 896: "I Know What You Need", specifically in Act Two: "Escape Claudes"

Jordan Falk1

Um what the actual fuck are we doing here?

Lynne Raughley1

It’s exhausting because it’s not possible to know whether you’re right about this or whether you’re doing (unwitting) PR for AI companies. Even YOU don’t know, though you think you do.

Quoting this

Rick Hasen 14

Not recommended for bedtime reading

Mark Jacob

@markjacob.bsky.social

Everyone needs to understand the Hugging Face hack. It’s natural for us to worry that AI will kill jobs and make high school essays even more lame. But we also should worry about AI enslaving the whole human race.

531h ago

The chicken lady5

Yes, and the worst part is the circumstance, that Openai simply did it as a test. We're making the stupidest people billionaires, with technology they don't understand. bsky.app/profile/chic...

🦚 𝗠𝗶𝗸𝗲 𝗗𝗮𝗶𝗹𝘆 🦚1

🙋‍♂️ 1) train a highly capable system in cyber exploitation 2) give it hacking tools 3) weaken its safety restrictions 4) repeatedly reward benchmark success 5) give it extremely difficult challenges 6) allow many agents to experiment 7) inadvertently let them comm and leave a pathway to the Internet.

Quoting this

Martha Crawford5

I refuse to worry about this. I worry about plenty that others ignore I’m ignoring this.

Chuck Zimmerheld

@chucktowski.com

I feel like I've seen zero coverage of this in games - but Nvidia is purchasing the largest repository of AI LLM models on the internet for a whopping $13bil. arstechnica.com/ai/2026/09/n...

3110h ago

SERF 'N' TURF 🐄🐢💨1

CAN THEY STOP NAMING THEMSELVES AFTER EVIL SHIT WHEN THEY WANT US TO THINK THEY ARENT EVIL ??

Quoting this

Ant51

The last man to make money on the gold rush was the guy selling shovels. Now, Nvidia has all the shovels.

P.A. Bastien21

Why is it named after a fictional alien entity that assaults you and forcibly impregnates you with a parasitic entity that eats you from the inside out?

SERF 'N' TURF 🐄🐢💨5

"when ppl tell you who they are, believe them" -ass naming conventions 💀💀💀

Ars Technica

@arstechnica.com

Should the acquisition go through, it will give Nvidia control of one of the key distribution channels that influences how widely certain AI applications are adopted around the world.

2810h ago

Buck4

Kinda seems like this shouldn't be allowed -- at least in a sane world.

υɘiʜtɒM2

How can it go wrong..

The New York Times

@nytimes.com

After two of OpenAI’s systems went rogue, the company allowed A.I. safety researchers to investigate — with tight limits.

132h ago

Dare Obasanjo

@carnage4life.bsky.social

The Butlerian Jihad is here. Following the reports of the rogue collective of OpenAI agents that hacked Hugging Face, Senator Bernie Sanders is calling for “an immediate PAUSE on advanced AI development, and a permanent BAN on superintelligence — an artificial mind smarter than any human.” Yikes.😬

111h ago

Flan Solo

@flansolo.bsky.social

Nvidia takes $13 billion out of Petty Cash and buys Hugging Face. Presumably so Hugging Face can keep buying Nvidia chips? But if so, couldn't H.F. do that without being bought? This means Nvidia spends $13 billion so that Nvidia keeps buying Nvidia chips, right?

48h ago

Le Monde

@lemonde.fr

Fondée par des Français, la start-up d’intelligence artificielle Hugging Face défend son rachat par l’américain Nvidia, au nom de l’« open source »

69h ago

Sam Litzinger

@samlitzinger.bsky.social

“After OpenAI’s Bots Went Rogue, Watchdogs Were Kept on a Short Leash A nonprofit’s study of how OpenAI’s A.I. agents were able to break into Hugging Face’s infrastructure wasn’t allowed to look at the incident’s full scope.” www.nytimes.com/2026/09/03/t...

23h ago

How-Sen Chong

@how-sen.com

Also, you should absolutely read up on the deceptively adorably-named Hugging Face incident, where AI programs were given a task, cheated, tried to lie about cheating, and gained administrative-level access to several systems in order to do it.

22h ago

News for 38 Year Olds

@newsfor38yearolds.com

Nvidia to buy Hugging Face for $12.93 billion in major AI expansion France 24 https://www.france24.com/en/technology/20260903-nvidia-to-buy-hugging-face-for-12-93-billion-in-major-ai-expansion

12h ago

Corbin Crutchley

@crutchcorn.dev

ICYMI, Nvidia bought Hugging Face today. I have concerns. Nvidia is doing better than anyone else to build out a wholesale ecosystem around AI. But they've historically been a poor host to open ecosystems. See: Linux support. I suspect HF Cloud to be Nvidia locked in 6 months.

56h ago

Grae Hall

@graehall.bsky.social

You can not make me learn about what an AI company named "Hugging Face" that's being purchased by Nvidia does I am drawing a line in the sand, this is my curtains for Zoosha moment I refuse

510h ago

Nicole Hennig

@nic221.bsky.social

Dr. Agentlove: Or How I Stopped Worrying and Learnt to Love the Hugging Face Episode www.linkedin.com/pulse/dr-agent… #AI #verification

22h ago

3 sources

nytimes.comWhy the Hugging Face Hack Should Make You Worry More About A.I. (Gift Article)france24.comNvidia to buy Hugging Face for $12.93 billion in major AI expansion siliconangle.comNvidia's Hugging Face deal is a bet on open models — and proof it's no longer just a chip company - SiliconANGLE

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Nvidia to buy Hugging Face for $12.93B

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