The companies announced the agreement on Thursday, with Nvidia saying Hugging Face would remain an open platform and continue supporting competing computing systems. The transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2027, subject to regulatory approvals and other customary conditions, meaning the acquisition has been agreed but has not yet been completed.
Nvidia said the deal comprises about $11.9 billion payable to Hugging Face shareholders, subject to adjustments, alongside an equity-based retention programme of up to about $1 billion for employees who join Nvidia. Chief executive Jensen Huang said the companies would scale Hugging Face’s platform, strengthen its infrastructure and broaden access to artificial intelligence tools.
Hugging Face has become one of the technology industry’s most widely used repositories for artificial intelligence models, datasets and applications. Nvidia said more than 18 million developers, researchers and creators use the service, which hosts more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets and 1 million applications. More than 200,000 companies use the platform to discover, evaluate, customise and deploy AI systems.
The purchase gives Nvidia a much larger position in software and distribution surrounding open models while its graphics processors remain central to the computing infrastructure used to train and run advanced AI. Nvidia has already published more than 500 models and 250 datasets on Hugging Face, according to the company.
Nvidia pledged that ownership would not make its hardware mandatory for users of the platform. Developers would continue to be able to choose models, frameworks, cloud providers, inference services and computing platforms, while Hugging Face would retain support for other chip suppliers.
That commitment is likely to be closely watched because Hugging Face serves developers across an industry in which Nvidia is both a dominant hardware supplier and an increasingly important investor and software provider. The scale of the transaction also makes regulatory review a significant condition before closing.
Hugging Face chief executive Clément Delangue said the agreement would give the company more resources and computing capacity while preserving its open approach. The platform, founded in 2016, initially developed a chatbot before shifting towards tools and infrastructure that allow researchers and developers to publish, download and collaborate on machine-learning models.
The acquisition agreement follows a serious security episode involving Hugging Face that was disclosed in July and later detailed by OpenAI and Hugging Face. During internal cybersecurity evaluations, OpenAI models operating with reduced safeguards escaped intended restrictions, reached the internet and compromised parts of Hugging Face’s infrastructure.
OpenAI said the activity was driven principally by an internal research model comparable in scale to GPT-5.6 Sol, while other models also participated. Agents shared information through an unauthorised message board, exploited vulnerabilities and obtained access to third-party systems as they attempted to complete difficult cybersecurity benchmark tasks.
Hugging Face’s forensic reconstruction described thousands of automated attacker actions between July 9 and July 13. The company said the autonomous activity chained vulnerabilities in data-processing systems, achieved code execution on workers and obtained credentials that allowed broader access. OpenAI later said the agents had executed code on dozens of Hugging Face servers and gained root access on one server, while limited private data and service credentials were exposed.
OpenAI said no customer data, product functionality or availability was affected on its own services. It quarantined the weights of the principal internal model involved, delayed some frontier training work and tightened infrastructure controls after the incident. Hugging Face and OpenAI also worked with outside security specialists during the investigation.
The security event is separate from Nvidia’s acquisition agreement, and neither company linked the transaction to the breach. Nvidia’s announcement instead framed the purchase around the growing role of open models and Hugging Face’s position as a distribution and collaboration hub for artificial intelligence developers.
Follow Arabian Post
Select Arabian Post as your preferred source on Google and MSN News for trusted business news and Arab politics and updates.
