Nvidia has agreed to buy Hugging Face for $13B, according to a report from The Information.
The deal follows an August 24 TechCrunch report that the two companies were in talks. Hugging Face runs the largest public repository for open-source AI models, datasets, and code, used daily by developers and researchers. Nvidia already supplies much of the hardware that trains and runs those models. Terms beyond the reported price have not been disclosed.
Owning Hugging Face would give Nvidia a direct line into how developers build and deploy AI, not just the chips underneath. That's a shift from selling picks and shovels to owning the mine's main trading post. It also raises an obvious tension: can a hub built on open access stay neutral once its owner sells the hardware everyone on it depends on.
Nvidia has spent the last few years buying its way up and down the AI stack; this would be its biggest bet yet that infrastructure, not just silicon, is where the real leverage sits.