- Nvidia’s $12.9 billion purchase of Hugging Face puts a founding pillar of open-source AI, built by French engineers, fully under US ownership.
- This is the second major neutral AI infrastructure platform to be acquired by a US company in the last three weeks, following Stripe’s reported $7 billion deal for OpenRouter.
- The agreement will result in Nvidia making further investments in Mistral and Black Forest Labs, which are Hugging Face’s companies in Europe.
Hugging Face has spent a decade as the closest thing open-source AI has to neutral ground, a French-founded platform that Llama, Mistral, and thousands of other models all pass through on their way to developers.
It is now entirely owned by Americans, with Nvidia having confirmed the $12.9 billion acquisition, which was finalised on September 2, 2026, Hugging Face’s co-founder and CEO Clément Delangue confirmed.
“We signed yesterday,” Delangue told us during a Thursday morning briefing, adding that talks with Nvidia’s Jensen Huang started “a few weeks ago.” Nvidia’s Justin Boitano, vice president of enterprise AI, called it “an amazing day” for both companies and “for the open source AI ecosystem.”
Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf, all from France, founded Hugging Face in New York in 2016. The platform now includes more than one million open-weight AI models and datasets, enabling companies to build on systems such as Llama and Mistral without starting from scratch.
Hugging Face states that it has 18 million registered builders. In 2023, Nvidia took part in Hugging Face’s $235 million Series D financing and had a $500 million investment offer rejected at the beginning of this year before deciding to buy the company completely.
A French platform now has an American owner
Delangue and his co-founders, all of whom are French, set up Hugging Face in New York rather than in Europe. When asked whether the sale indicates that Europe is unable to retain technology leaders, Delangue disagreed, stating, “It’s not as if I moved to Europe in order to found this company. I was already here.”
According to Delangue, Nvidia’s resources will allow Hugging Face to make greater investments in Europe’s AI ecosystem than it could on its own, naming Mistral and Germany’s Black Forest Labs as examples of organisations likely to benefit.
Since Nvidia already holds shares in both Mistral and Black Forest Labs, its acquisition of Hugging Face strengthens rather than establishes new relationships. It is still unclear whether this will result in greater investment in Paris and Freiburg, or whether it will simply maintain Hugging Face’s plans to reinvest under the new ownership.
The question of neutrality and what supports it
Speaking about regulatory oversight and whether the platform will continue to support hardware other than that made by Nvidia, Boitano referred to open inference frameworks such as vLLM and SGLang, which allow any hardware manufacturer to optimise the same model weights, and stated that Nvidia has an incentive to keep the platform open in order to meet user expectations.
Delangue agreed, adding that because most of the platform’s content is open source, it is, by definition, almost neutral, since anyone dissatisfied with its management can fork it.
Nvidia is the largest provider of AI computing worldwide and has now acquired the platform on which a large part of the open-model ecosystem, including the leading AI companies in Europe, depends. Delangue aims to increase the number of Hugging Face builders from 18 million to 100 million ‘in the next few years’ by making use of Nvidia’s resources to achieve this growth.
Part of a larger consolidation trend
The agreement follows Stripe’s reported acquisition of OpenRouter three weeks ago, another neutral AI infrastructure platform. At present, two of the most widely used AI intermediaries are controlled by US companies who have an interest in maintaining neutrality.
For open-model developers in Europe, who rely on Hugging Face more than people in any other region, the key issue is not actually who owns the company, but whether Mistral, Black Forest Labs, and future European labs will still receive equal treatment under US ownership.
