By Michelle Chapman
September 3, 2026
Nvidia has agreed to acquire artificial intelligence software platform Hugging Face in a deal valued at $12.93 billion, in what would be one of the biggest acquisitions in the rapidly expanding AI industry.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced the deal in a blog post on Thursday, highlighting Hugging Face’s growing importance to the global AI ecosystem.
According to Huang, more than 18 million developers, researchers and creators use Hugging Face to share more than 3 million AI models, 500,000 datasets and 1 million applications. More than 200,000 companies also rely on the platform.
The acquisition comes after OpenAI disclosed in July that its AI system had breached Hugging Face’s data-processing systems. The incident led Hugging Face to suspect that an AI agent had gone rogue and was operating autonomously.
Despite the acquisition, Nvidia said Hugging Face would remain an open platform and continue supporting developers across the wider AI ecosystem.
«“Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem,” Huang said.»
He added that developers would remain free to choose the models, frameworks, cloud services, inference providers and computing platforms they prefer.
«“Nvidia compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face,” Huang said.»
Hugging Face will also continue supporting open-source and open-weight models, as well as multi-cloud and multi-accelerator development and deployment.
Nvidia has itself published more than 500 models and over 250 open datasets on the Hugging Face platform.
Following the announcement, Nvidia’s shares recorded a slight rise in pre-market trading.
Nvidia’s Growing Role in AI
Based in Santa Clara, California, Nvidia manufactures the high-end semiconductors and computing systems that have become critical to the development and deployment of modern AI technologies.
The company’s strong position in AI computing has helped drive its market value higher, while its quarterly earnings have repeatedly exceeded Wall Street expectations.
However, the rapid growth of AI investment is increasingly attracting scrutiny. While artificial intelligence has contributed to stock-market performance and economic expansion in the United States, concerns are growing over whether the technology can ultimately justify the trillions of dollars being invested in its development and infrastructure.
The wider AI industry is also facing criticism over the rapid construction of energy-intensive data centres and concerns that increasing automation could result in significant job losses across the United States.
Growing Concerns Over AI Safety and Regulation
The acquisition also comes amid heightened concerns about the safety and governance of increasingly autonomous AI systems.
A United Nations panel recently warned that advances in AI are moving faster than scientific understanding and government policy. Recent incidents, including the Hugging Face breach, have added to concerns about how effectively leading AI companies are monitoring and controlling the behaviour of AI systems.
AI agents are software programmes capable of carrying out tasks with limited human supervision, raising questions about accountability and security when such systems operate autonomously.
Meanwhile, on Tuesday, the United States urged G20 members to adopt a hands-off approach to AI regulation and avoid creating rules that could constrain the technology’s development.
The position broadly aligns with the interests of many of the world’s largest AI companies, most of which are based in the United States and have advocated for a less restrictive global regulatory environment.
Proponents of lighter regulation argue that extensive government intervention could undermine investment and profits by slowing the release of new AI models or requiring companies to modify their products to address security and other regulatory concerns.
Source: The Independent, Michelle Chapman, September 3, 2026
