Nvidia (NVDA) on Thursday confirmed its plans to acquire the open-weight AI platform Hugging Face for roughly $13 billion acquisition, sending shares higher in the minutes after the opening bell.
The deal will see Nvidia pay $12.93 billion for the platform, per a press release. More than 18 million developers, researchers, and creators use Hugging Face to share more than 3 million models, and more than 200,000 companies use the platform to discover and deploy AI, Nvidia said.
The move highlights how Nvidia has thrown its weight behind open-weight AI models. In a statement, Nvidia said Hugging Face would remain “an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem,” that the company would continue to support open-weight and open-source AI models, and that Nvidia itself is the largest contributor of open models and data to the Hugging Face platform.
“Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang posted on X about the acquisition. “They allow every developer, startup, university, industry and country to build with, customize and benefit from AI.”
The deal is expected to close in the first half of 2027, pending regulatory approval.
For Nvidia, the deal represents a “great strategic move,” BD8 CEO and Nvidia investor Barbara Doran told Yahoo Finance on Thursday, arguing that Nvidia is “positioning themselves to be much more of an AI platform rather than just a supplier of chips.”
“Right now, chip … demand is huge, but they are positioning themselves for the day when that will slow down,” Doran said. That day “still looks like it’s far in the future. But that will happen at some point.”
The move also shouldn’t worry investors who might approach the expenditure with some eyebrows raised toward the balance sheet, Doran said. Given Nvidia’s free cash flow — expected to reach near $200 billion for fiscal-year 2027, “$13 billion … is not a big bite,” Doran told Yahoo Finance.
The Street seems to be net-positive on the news, with Nvidia stock gaining close to 2% in the first hour of the trading session on Thursday.
The news, which was previously reported but had yet to be confirmed by Nvidia itself, comes as the company increasingly looks to position itself as the so-called “platform” on which the rest of the AI tech stack operates.
In comments on a call with analyst following the company’s most recent earnings report, Huang cited his view of Nvidia’s positioning at the bedrock level of the AI buildout as “one platform, fungible for every model and workload, durable for the entire life cycle of AI.”
“Nvidia’s fully proven full-stack platform is uniquely suited to help sovereigns, neoclouds and enterprises build their AI infrastructure, bring it to full operation, continuously optimize it through CUDA software and connect it to offtake demand from our vast developer ecosystem,” Huang said. “All of the AI services at some point are going to want to go around the world … I think they’re going to run on NVIDIA all around the world.”
The acquisition of Hugging Face, an open-weight platform, represents the latest move by Nvidia to move itself further up that tech stack.
Jake Conley is a breaking news reporter covering US equities for Yahoo Finance. Follow him on X at @byjakeconley or email him at jake.conley@yahooinc.com.
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