Hugging Face built a $4.5 billion empire on free AI models. Now Nvidia is buying it for $12.9 billion
Thomas Wolf has spent a decade convincing the world that open-source AI is not a charity project. On August 27, 2026, the market settled the argument. Nvidia agreed to buy Hugging Face, the company famous for hosting the open-source AI ecosystem with more than 3 million open-source LLMs, for $12.9 billion, according to The Information, a price that values the ten-year-old startup at roughly 86 times its $150 million in annualized revenue and nearly triple the $4.5 billion valuation it fetched in 2023.
The deal is one of Nvidia’s largest acquisitions to date, leaked the same day the chipmaker reported $96.2 billion in quarterly revenue and forecasts a 70 percent jump in revenue next fiscal year and disclosed it has $18 billion committed to equity investments through 2027. At Nvidia’s current pace, $12.9 billion is about thirteen days of sales.
Nvidia is about to spend two weeks of...
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