Nvidia Agrees to Buy Hugging Face, Where Creators Get Their Open Video and Image Models, for $12.9 Billion

The platform where AI filmmakers find, fine-tune, and deploy open image and video models is set to change hands. Nvidia has agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, according to The Information, and neither company has confirmed the reported agreement.

• Reported, not confirmed. The Information first reported the deal, citing a person with knowledge of it, and Reuters relayed the report; Nvidia and Hugging Face did not respond to requests for comment.
• Hugging Face spans far more than LLMs. The platform hosts more than 2 million models across text, image, video, audio, and 3D, with hosted spaces for models like Wan 2.2 video and Krea 2 Turbo image generation.
• Nvidia was already a backer. It joined a 2023 funding round in Hugging Face alongside Salesforce and Alphabet's Google that valued the company at $4.5 billion.
• Nvidia has capital lined up. The chipmaker said it has $18 billion committed to equity investments for the rest of its 2027 fiscal year.

Creators already pull open video and image weights straight from Hugging Face

Hugging Face works as the distribution layer under much of open creative AI. Readers already download Krea 2's open weights from it to run 2K image models locally.

The same platform carries Tencent's lightweight Hunyuan video model and the model files that feed a ComfyUI graph.

Nvidia ships its own releases there too, including the ARDY human-motion model with its code and weights.

Hugging Face's price climbed from a rejected $7 billion valuation to a $12.9 billion buyout

The reported $12.9 billion price sits well above Nvidia's last attempt to buy in. The Financial Times reported that Hugging Face rejected a $500 million Nvidia investment the prior year that would have valued it at $7 billion, according to Reuters' account.

At the reported figure, Nvidia would pay to own outright a company it could not take a minority stake in a year earlier.

Hugging Face's model-neutral role is unresolved under Nvidia ownership

Hugging Face hosts more than 2 million models from many labs. The ComfyUI workflows that pull those models run on a range of GPUs, not just Nvidia's.

Neither Nvidia nor Hugging Face has said whether that model-neutral role changes under ownership by the company that makes the dominant AI GPUs.