Nvidia to Acquire Hugging Face for $12.9 Billion

Nvidia (NASDAQ: $NVDA) has agreed to acquire artificial intelligence platform Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, giving the chipmaker a major foothold in the software and developer tools powering the AI industry.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced the deal Thursday, saying Hugging Face serves more than 18 million developers and hosts more than 3 million AI models. “Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem,” he wrote, adding that developers would remain free to choose their models, frameworks, cloud providers, and computing platforms.

Hugging Face will continue supporting models and infrastructure from companies other than Nvidia. Huang said Nvidia hardware would not be required to build or deploy AI systems through the platform.

The companies have already worked together on AI infrastructure and development tools. Nvidia currently has more than 500 models and 250 open datasets on Hugging Face.

The deal also comes with a substantial employee retention package. Nvidia will pay roughly $11.9 billion to Hugging Face investors and set aside as much as $1 billion in equity-based compensation for employees who join Nvidia, Reuters reported.

The acquisition is expected to close in 2027.

The purchase comes roughly a month after Hugging Face disclosed a security incident involving an autonomous AI agent that obtained unauthorized access to internal datasets and service credentials.

Notably, more companies are adding support for agentic payments. Last month, crypto exchange Binance also launched a platform that lets AI agents analyze markets and execute trades on users’ behalf.

Markus Levin, co-founder of XYO, said payment systems will need strict controls before agents can be trusted with financial decisions. “AI agents need a clearly defined identity, permissions, transaction limits and an auditable record of how a decision was reached,” he told Cryptoprowl.

Levin also warned that agents could be manipulated by merchants, other AI systems, or malicious instructions. “Payment infrastructure needs to enforce permissions independently of the model, so that even if an agent is manipulated, it cannot spend outside its authorized scope,” he said.