If you work in artificial intelligence, you almost certainly use Hugging Face every day. It is the platform where the world’s AI developers share models, datasets, and tools — a kind of GitHub for machine learning. And today — on September 3, 2026 — the ownership story of Hugging Face changed forever. NVIDIA officially confirmed it has acquired Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, making it the largest AI infrastructure deal in NVIDIA’s history and one of the most significant moments in the open-source AI movement.
Here is the complete story — from a teenage chatbot app in New York to a $12.93 billion deal with the world’s most valuable semiconductor company.
What Is Hugging Face?
Hugging Face is an American AI company and open-source platform that hosts over three million models, one million applications, and half a million datasets, used by over 18 million developers worldwide. It is best known as the central hub where researchers, companies, and independent developers share, access, and deploy machine learning models — including many of the most powerful open-weight AI models available today.
The company was founded in 2016 and is headquartered in Brooklyn, New York, with offices in Paris, France. Before today’s acquisition, it employed approximately 987 people and had raised a total of $395 million in private funding across eight rounds.
Who Owns Hugging Face Right Now — September 3, 2026?
As of today, September 3, 2026, Hugging Face is owned by NVIDIA Corporation. NVIDIA entered into a definitive acquisition agreement on September 2, 2026, and confirmed the deal publicly on September 3, 2026, for a total acquisition price of $12.93 billion.
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang confirmed the deal in a public blog post, stating that Hugging Face will continue to support open-source and open-weight models and will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem. He added: “NVIDIA compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face.”
Before this acquisition, Hugging Face was a privately owned startup backed by its three co-founders, venture capital firms, and major technology corporations. Today, all of that changes — NVIDIA now controls the most important open-source AI platform in the world.
Ownership and Key Stakeholders Table
| Owner / Stakeholder | Type | Stake / Role | Key Detail |
|---|---|---|---|
| NVIDIA Corporation | Current Owner (post-acquisition) | 100% ownership as of Sept 3, 2026 | Acquired for $12.93 billion; CEO Jensen Huang confirmed the deal |
| Clément Delangue | Co-Founder & CEO | Founder equity (pre-acquisition) | Leads Hugging Face; thanked community in post-acquisition statement on X |
| Julien Chaumond | Co-Founder & CTO | Founder equity (pre-acquisition) | Oversees technical infrastructure |
| Thomas Wolf | Co-Founder & Chief Science Officer | Founder equity (pre-acquisition) | Guides research direction |
| Salesforce Ventures | Lead Series D Investor | Pre-acquisition equity | Led the $235M Series D round in August 2023 |
| Corporate Investor | Pre-acquisition equity | Invested in Series D; major cloud and AI partner | |
| Amazon | Corporate Investor | Pre-acquisition equity | Invested in Series D; AWS integration partner |
| Microsoft | Corporate Investor | Pre-acquisition equity | Strategic investor across multiple rounds |
| Intel Capital, AMD, Qualcomm, IBM | Corporate Investors | Pre-acquisition equity | Participated across multiple funding rounds |
| Sequoia Capital, Coatue, Lux Capital | Venture Capital Firms | Pre-acquisition equity | Among the largest VC backers |
| Kevin Durant / Thirty-Five Ventures | Celebrity & Strategic Investor | Pre-acquisition minority stake | Part of the broad pre-acquisition investor group |
The Origin Story: From Teen Chatbot to AI’s Most Important Platform
Hugging Face did not start as the sophisticated AI platform it is today. It started as a chatbot app for teenagers.
CEO Clément Delangue, CTO Julien Chaumond, and Chief Science Officer Thomas Wolf founded Hugging Face in New York City in 2016. The original product was an “AI best friend” designed for casual conversation with young users — built on early natural language processing models. It was playful, lightweight, and aimed squarely at a consumer audience that had nothing to do with professional AI research.
The pivot that changed everything came with BERT — Google’s landmark NLP model released in 2018. The Hugging Face team open-sourced a working implementation of BERT within a week, and the response from the global developer community was so overwhelming that the team abandoned the chatbot entirely. By 2019, Hugging Face had reinvented itself as an open-source platform for sharing and collaborating on machine learning models. It was the right product at exactly the right moment — and the developer world never looked back.
The Funding Journey: $395 Million and a $4.5 Billion Valuation
Before NVIDIA’s acquisition, Hugging Face had raised $395 million in private funding across eight rounds, building one of the most impressive investor rosters in the history of AI startups.
The last confirmed funding round was a Series D completed in August 2023, raising $235 million led by Salesforce Ventures — with investments from Google, Amazon, IBM, NVIDIA, and many others. That round valued Hugging Face at $4.5 billion. The $12.93 billion acquisition price today represents nearly a 3x premium over that last valuation — in just three years.
Early investors include Lux Capital, Betaworks Ventures, Sound Ventures, Sequoia, Coatue, A.Capital, and SV Angel. Corporate investors include virtually every major technology company in the AI space — Google, Amazon, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, IBM, and Salesforce all held stakes before today’s acquisition.
Why NVIDIA Bought Hugging Face — And Why It Matters
This is not just a financial deal. It is a strategic masterstroke — and it signals where NVIDIA believes the future of AI is heading.
NVIDIA is the world’s dominant provider of AI chips — its H100 and H200 GPUs power virtually every major AI training workload in existence. But chips alone are not a platform. By acquiring Hugging Face, NVIDIA now owns the layer where 18 million developers actually work — where models are shared, discovered, fine-tuned, and deployed. It is the difference between owning the roads and owning the roads plus every gas station, map app, and auto parts store on them.
Hugging Face had actually turned down a smaller $500 million deal with NVIDIA as recently as January 28, 2026 — a deal it rejected because the valuation was too low. Eight months later, NVIDIA came back with a $12.93 billion offer that the Hugging Face founders could not refuse. CEO Clément Delangue acknowledged this directly in his post-acquisition statement on X, saying the deal gives Hugging Face the compute, support, collaboration, and visibility it needs to scale the open-source AI mission to a much larger audience.
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has also been explicit about his commitment to open-source: Hugging Face will remain an open platform. NVIDIA compute will not be required to use it. Every model, every dataset, every application — open to all developers, regardless of what hardware they use.
Hugging Face’s Latest Moves Before the Acquisition
Even before the NVIDIA deal, 2026 was a landmark year for Hugging Face. The company acquired GGML.ai in February 2026, expanding its model optimization capabilities. It also acquired Pollen Robotics in April 2025, pushing into the physical AI and humanoid robot space.
Hugging Face’s robot duck product sold over $2.6 million in just 24 hours as of August 31, 2026 — an indicator of how far the company had expanded beyond pure software. The company’s LeRobot open robotics platform, developed in collaboration with NVIDIA, had also been gaining significant traction among robotics developers globally.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Q1. Who owns Hugging Face in 2026?
As of September 3, 2026, Hugging Face is owned by NVIDIA Corporation, which acquired it for $12.93 billion.
Q2. Who founded Hugging Face?
Hugging Face was founded in 2016 by Clément Delangue (CEO), Julien Chaumond (CTO), and Thomas Wolf (Chief Science Officer) in New York City.
Q3. How much did NVIDIA pay for Hugging Face?
NVIDIA acquired Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, with the definitive agreement signed on September 2, 2026 and publicly confirmed on September 3, 2026.
Q4. Will Hugging Face remain open-source after the NVIDIA acquisition?
Yes. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang confirmed that Hugging Face will remain an open platform and that NVIDIA compute will not be required to build or deploy through it.
Q5. How much had Hugging Face raised before the NVIDIA acquisition?
Hugging Face raised a total of $395 million across eight funding rounds, with its last round being a $235 million Series D in August 2023 led by Salesforce Ventures.
Q6. What was Hugging Face’s valuation before the acquisition?
Hugging Face was last valued at $4.5 billion during its Series D in 2023. The $12.93 billion acquisition price represents nearly a 3x premium over that valuation.
Q7. What does Hugging Face actually do?
Hugging Face hosts over three million AI models, half a million datasets, and one million applications used by more than 18 million developers worldwide — essentially the GitHub of machine learning.
Q8. Did Hugging Face reject a previous NVIDIA offer?
Yes. On January 28, 2026, Hugging Face turned down a $500 million deal from NVIDIA, citing too low a valuation. NVIDIA returned with the $12.93 billion offer eight months later.
Hugging Face is now owned by NVIDIA Corporation, following the official confirmation of a $12.93 billion acquisition on September 3, 2026 — today. The deal makes NVIDIA the owner of the world’s most important open-source AI platform, home to three million models, one million applications, and 18 million developers.
Hugging Face was founded in 2016 by Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf as a teen chatbot app, before pivoting into the open-source AI platform that became the backbone of the global machine learning community. It raised $395 million and was valued at $4.5 billion as recently as 2023. Today’s $12.93 billion acquisition price is nearly three times that figure — and it marks the beginning of a new chapter for open-source AI under one of the most powerful companies in the technology world.
