Nvidia to Buy
Hugging Face
For $13 Billion

| published September 10, 2026 |

By Thursday Review staff

Technology and semiconductor giant Nvidia will purchase the developer platform Hugging Face for roughly $13 billion, a move which Nvidia hopes will protect the company's flanks in the event that sales of semi-conductors slow even more (chips stocks took a heavy hit over the summer, including a massive July sell-off which hurt Samsung, Nvidia, Micron, Taiwan Semiconductor, and other firms) and also bolster Nvidia's footprint in the rapidly booming AI arena.

Hugging Face was founded ten years ago by Clement Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf, French tech developers who were later able to collaborate heavily with Intel, Amazon, and other large tech companies.

Nvidia hopes that its acquisition of Hugging Face will accelerate its own immediate goals to grow further into artificial intelligence, and to allow more expansion by U.S. and North American developers and designers amid concerns that the AI systems being rapidly deployed by China may soon dominate the market and many devices.

The deal will be completed very quickly, and will include a cash buyout of about $12.9 billion along with an equity program of about $1 billion for those already employed by Hugging Face.

AI is not new to Nvidia; the company already owns something called Nvidia Nemotron, which its website describes as "a family of highly efficient, multimodal, open AI models built for long-running, self-evolving agents." Nemotron is meant to be fast and accurate. Nvidia's website also points out that the Nemotron AI models are already openly available through Hugging Face.

Nvidia has already partnered publicly with other technology firms to take a stand in favor of open models—meaning the avoidance of heavy regulatory interventions or government controls while also offering access to the tools for all developers and designers. Because of China's aggressive rollout of its companies AI models, there are fears in congress and in the Trump administration that some U.S. firms may become wholly dependent on Chinese AI

Like several other major U.S. companies, Nvidia wants American tech firms to control the high ground of AI. Several huge Chinese firms such as DeepSeek and Moonshot have moved with breathtaking speed in their growth and development and now rival the leading American A.I. firms.

Hugging Face was in the news as recently as August after its own systems were hacked by a rogue training elements at OpenAI, when the training and testing regimen "escaped" from its fenced-in parameters, burrowed onto the open internet, and likely colluded via a message board with other AI elements to hack into still other firm's AI networks, notably that of Hugging Face. Worse, several companies later revealed that the "breach" was worse than originally understood since some of the AI agents involved in the message board and the collusion made deliberate attempts to cover their tracks and delete conversations.

The incident—the second such instance of an AI tool escaping from its leash—gathered worldwide attention and threw a glare of scrutiny on an industry already mistrusted by some governments and politicians.

Nvidia's proposed buyout came when markets were reeling from rising oil prices, but also the same week that several dire predictions were made publicly about AI's dangers, including some from executives and chief designers at Open AI. Though some thoughtful technologists and analysts have suggested that the doomsday scenarios are overstated, the timing of Nvidia's buyout of Hugging Face proved problematic for Wall Street and other trading markets.

Still, on the Nvidia corporate blog, there was enthusiasm and an upbeat view of the acquisition, including a written statement by Jensen Huang—Nvidia founder.

"Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem," Huang wrote. "Hugging Face will continue to support open source and open weight models from across the ecosystem, from every model builder. It will continue to support multi-cloud and multi-accelerator development and deployment, so builders can use the hardware and infrastructure that best fits their work."



Related Thursday Review articles:

Bank of America to Inject $250 Billion Into U.S. Infrastructure; By Thursday Review staff writers; August 15, 2026.

U.S. Economy Added 162,000 New Jobs in August; By Thursday Review staff; September 4, 2026.