KEY POINTS:

• Nvidia has agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12,930,300,000, according to a Form 8-K filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and a Sept. 3, 2026, post by Chief Executive Jensen Huang.

• The 8-K divides that figure into approximately $11.9 billion payable to Hugging Face stockholders and an equity retention program worth up to about $1 billion for employees joining Nvidia.

• Nvidia committed in the filing to keep the platform open, and Huang wrote that “NVIDIA compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face.”

• Nvidia participated in Hugging Face’s August 2023 funding round, which valued the company at $4.5 billion, according to Axios and TechCrunch.

• As of Sept. 7, no U.S. or European regulator has been reported commenting on the record on this transaction. The filing states closing is subject to required regulatory approvals.

Nvidia has agreed to buy Hugging Face, the platform through which most publicly available AI models are hosted and downloaded, in a deal the chipmaker put at $12,930,300,000, according to a Form 8-K filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and a post published Sept. 3, 2026, by Chief Executive Jensen Huang on Nvidia’s blog.

The filing, signed by Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer Colette M. Kress and carrying an event date of Sept. 2, 2026, separates that figure into approximately $11.9 billion payable to Hugging Face stockholders, subject to adjustment, and an equity-based retention program worth up to approximately $1 billion for employees who join Nvidia. Nvidia stated in the filing that it expects the deal to close in the first half of 2027, subject to customary closing conditions including required regulatory approvals.

Reported figures vary. Bloomberg described the transaction as worth about $13 billion, per search results, while TechCrunch and Tom’s Hardware reported $12.93 billion. CNN Business reported the same split of $11.9 billion to shareholders and $1 billion in equity.

What Nvidia has promised

Huang wrote that developers would continue to choose their own models, frameworks, clouds and computing platforms, and that “NVIDIA compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face.” He also wrote that Nvidia is the largest contributor of open models and data to the platform.

The 8-K contains a parallel commitment. Nvidia stated it intends to keep the platform open, to permit model makers and users to upload and download models and datasets of their choosing, and “to support other silicon vendors.”

Justin Boitano, Nvidia’s vice president and general manager for enterprise computing, told Wccftech in a company question-and-answer session that regulators would view the deal favorably, describing the platform as a “deconcentration platform.”

Neither the filing nor Huang’s post attaches a duration or an enforcement mechanism to those commitments.

How the deal came together

Hugging Face co-founder and Chief Executive Clement Delangue told CNBC’s Becky Quick on “Squawk Box” on Sept. 3 that the company approached Huang, saying it had concluded during the summer that open-source AI was at a turning point and needed more resources, scale and visibility. He called Nvidia “a perfect home,” per search results.

In a post on X, Delangue said Nvidia had committed to “keeping the platform open, independent and compute agnostic,” and that the founders and team would stay.

Nvidia is not a new investor in the company. Axios and TechCrunch reported that Nvidia took part in Hugging Face’s $235 million Series D round in August 2023, which valued the company at $4.5 billion. CNN Business, Fortune and TechCrunch reported that the Financial Times reported Hugging Face rejected a $500 million Nvidia investment valuing it at $7 billion in late 2025. Fortune reported that Delangue declined to confirm that account.

The concentration question

Estimates of Nvidia’s share of the AI chip market differ. TrendForce estimated in an Oct. 30, 2025, release that Nvidia would hold approximately 70% of the AI chip market in 2025. Silicon Analysts put the figure at roughly 80% to 90% of the AI accelerator market by revenue as of 2025. In a March 19, 2026, letter to Huang concerning a different transaction, Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Richard Blumenthal wrote that Nvidia controlled “about 90% of the market for GPUs.”

Nvidia’s record with neutrality-sensitive acquisitions is mixed. Its $40 billion agreement to buy Arm, announced in September 2020 alongside a public pledge to preserve Arm’s open licensing model and customer neutrality, was abandoned in 2022 after regulatory opposition. Its Mellanox purchase, announced in 2019 at a total enterprise value of approximately $6.9 billion, closed in April 2020. In December 2025, CNBC reported that Nvidia would acquire the assets of AI chip startup Groq for about $20 billion in a structure that did not involve acquiring Groq as a company.

That structure drew scrutiny. Warren and Blumenthal wrote in their March 2026 letter that the arrangement appeared to be structured to evade scrutiny by antitrust regulators.

No comparable comment has surfaced on this deal. As of Sept. 7, The International Telegraph could not locate any on-the-record statement from the Justice Department, the Federal Trade Commission, the European Commission, the UK Competition and Markets Authority, or any legislator or state attorney general addressing the Hugging Face acquisition specifically.

What builders depend on

Nithya Ruff, chair of the Linux Foundation board, told VentureBeat that the long-term health and competitiveness of the AI ecosystem depend on open-source infrastructure, transparency and developer choice, adding: “Neutrality is a discipline a company must choose time and again.”

Duane O’Brien, executive director of the Open Source Initiative, told VentureBeat that history shows developers find or build more open alternatives when a platform pushes them through proprietary workflows.

The New Stack reported that Hugging Face’s core libraries, including transformers and diffusers, are open-source and can be forked. VentureBeat reported that the Hub itself, along with its inference endpoints and distribution infrastructure, is proprietary.

Not all criticism concerns ownership. Eric Hartford, creator of the open Dolphin models, told Fortune the platform never gave creators a way to monetize their work: “If I got a dollar for every download of Dolphin I’d be rich.”

Revenue figures for Hugging Face are inconsistent. TechCrunch reported The Information’s figure of $150 million in annual recurring revenue, while Delangue said in a July 20, 2026, interview with a16z that revenue had surpassed $100 million.

Nvidia shares closed at $228.45 on Sept. 3, up 1.80%, according to INDmoney. Stocktwits reported that Needham analyst Rajvindra Gill maintained a Buy rating with a $300 price target, and that Raymond James described the deal as largely immaterial financially but strategically valuable.

This is a developing story. Information may be incomplete and will be updated as more details become available.