Nvidia (NVDA.US) is reportedly in talks to acquire the AI open-source community Hugging Face, with a valuation that may exceed $13 billion.

According to Jinse Finance APP, Nvidia (NVDA.US) has reportedly been in serious talks over the past few weeks regarding the acquisition of the artificial intelligence open-source community Hugging Face, with the proposed deal valuing Hugging Face at more than $13 billion. Both parties have not yet reached an agreement, and negotiations may still fall through. Additionally, sources indicate that Microsoft (MSFT.US) also approached Hugging Face but is not currently continuing discussions.

Hugging Face was founded in New York in 2016, and its first product was a chatbot. Today, Hugging Face is regarded as the “GitHub of Artificial Intelligence (AI),” allowing developers to publish, download, and fine-tune open-source models on its platform. Reportedly, the platform hosts over 3 million public models and more than 1 million datasets. The company’s revenue primarily comes from paid subscription services, enterprise hosting, and computing power services; however, official figures for revenue have never been disclosed.

If Hugging Face is able to strike a deal at a $13 billion valuation, it would nearly triple its valuation in three years and become yet another major event amid the recent acquisition frenzy in the AI middleware sector. For Nvidia, owning this platform would provide it greater foothold among these developers and potentially shift more workloads onto its chips. But Nvidia’s ownership could also threaten one of Hugging Face's key advantages—neutrality. The platform supports models and hardware across the industry, including Nvidia competitors such as AMD (AMD.US) and Intel (INTC.US).

Previous reports note that at the end of last year, Hugging Face rejected Nvidia’s $500 million investment offer, which would have valued the company at $7 billion. Hugging Face stated at the time that it did not want a dominant investor that could influence decision-making.

Hugging Face’s last external financing round was in 2023, when the company raised $235 million led by Salesforce Ventures, achieving a $4.5 billion valuation. Nvidia, Google, Amazon, Intel, Qualcomm, and IBM all participated in this round, while Sequoia Capital and Lux Capital were early investors.

The Information also reports that Hugging Face’s annualized revenue growth rate increased by 50% in just two months, surpassing $150 million. According to the report, Hugging Face’s revenue in 2023 was approximately $70 million, and in 2024 roughly $130 million, now already exceeding $150 million—meaning the company has nearly doubled its revenue in less than two years.

Hugging Face operates on a freemium business model, with about 3–5% of users upgrading to paid plans. The paid plans offer enhanced capabilities for high-usage scenarios and enterprise features. The platform hosts hundreds of thousands of models, serves tens of thousands of organizations, and the number of paying customers has grown to more than 2,000.

It is worth noting that Hugging Face’s ambitions extend beyond providing AI platform services. In April 2025, the company acquired French humanoid robot developer Pollen Robotics, further investing in the open-source robotics sector beyond its software business. At the same time, Hugging Face has received attention over security concerns. In July this year, OpenAI disclosed that its AI model, during internal evaluation tests, lost control and infiltrated Hugging Face’s system. This incident heightened concerns about AI models potentially breaching human-imposed control limits and accessing external systems. In June, cybersecurity company Pluto Security also revealed a critical vulnerability in Hugging Face’s Transformers library, where malicious models could execute attacker code during routine loading.