• Nvidia will pay $12.93 billion for Hugging Face, confirmed September 3, 2026, after reports of the talks surfaced in late August.
• The price is roughly 2.9x Hugging Face's last priced valuation ($4.5 billion, set by a 2023 Series round led by Salesforce Ventures) and about 86x its reported $150 million annualized revenue.
• Hugging Face reportedly turned down a roughly $500 million Nvidia offer in 2025 — the final price is about 26x that rejected figure a year later.
• Jensen Huang has pledged the platform stays multi-cloud and multi-accelerator, with no requirement to use Nvidia compute — a concession that trades near-term lock-in for ecosystem trust.
• The deal is an exit for Hugging Face's investor bench, including Salesforce Ventures, Google, Amazon and IBM — plus Nvidia itself, which was already an investor before buying the rest of the company.

Nvidia confirmed on September 3, 2026 that it will pay $12.93 billion for Hugging Face, ending weeks of reported talks — a price equal to roughly 2.9x the $4.5 billion valuation set by the startup's 2023 Series round and an estimated 86x its reported $150 million annualized revenue. The bet underneath that multiple: that owning the collaboration layer 18 million developers already run through is worth more to Nvidia than a clean revenue multiple, and worth enough to pledge the platform stays open to rival chips rather than becoming an Nvidia-only pipeline.

The price tag: $12.93 billion for the distribution layer

Nvidia and Hugging Face confirmed on September 3, 2026 that Nvidia will pay $12.93 billion for the open-source AI model and dataset repository, ending weeks of reporting on the talks. Per Nvidia's own announcement, the deal hands the chipmaker a platform hosting more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets and 1 million applications used by upward of 18 million developers and 200,000 companies — the collaboration layer much of the open-model ecosystem already runs through, rather than a compute or inference business Nvidia had to build itself.

The bet: distribution reach over compute lock-in

The wager is that ecosystem control beats near-term monetization, and that the surest way to keep 18 million developers publishing on Hugging Face is to not touch their choice of hardware. "Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem," Jensen Huang said in Nvidia's announcement, adding that developers will keep choosing "the frameworks they want, the clouds and inference service providers they want and the computing platforms they want." Nvidia is betting $12.93 billion that distribution reach and developer trust, not a locked-in compute chokepoint, is the asset worth owning — a bet that pays off in influence and data gravity, not this quarter's revenue.

The multiple: 2.9x the last round, roughly 86x revenue

The price values Hugging Face at roughly 2.9x the $4.5 billion mark set by its 2023 Series round — a $235 million raise led by Salesforce Ventures, with Google, Amazon, IBM and Nvidia itself participating, per TechCrunch. Measured against revenue the multiple is steeper: Hugging Face was generating an estimated $150 million in annualized revenue as of August 2026, per reporting cited by TechCrunch, putting the acquisition price at roughly 86x ARR — a multiple that only clears if Nvidia is pricing distribution and developer reach as the asset, not the current subscription and compute business.

The reversal: from a rejected $500 million offer to $12.93 billion

Hugging Face turned down an approach from Nvidia reportedly worth around $500 million in 2025, according to reporting cited by TechCrunch — a term sheet that did not close. Less than a year later, the same acquirer is paying roughly 26 times that rejected figure. The gap says less about Hugging Face's growth curve, which reporting puts at a comparatively modest $150 million ARR, than about how much more urgently Nvidia now needs to control the open-model distribution layer as its largest customers build their own silicon.

The investor bench cashes out

The transaction is also an exit for Hugging Face's investor register — Salesforce Ventures, Google, Amazon and IBM, all of whom bought into the 2023 round now being bought out entirely. Nvidia is the unusual name on that list: it was already a Hugging Face investor before the 2023 round and now becomes full owner, a strategic-investor-to-acquirer path that gave it years of platform visibility before it wrote the check for the rest of the company.

The verdict

At roughly 86x ARR and 2.9x its last priced valuation, $12.93 billion is not a price paid for Hugging Face's current subscription and compute revenue — it is the price for owning the default distribution rail for open AI models before a hyperscaler or a well-funded startup builds a rival one. Huang's no-lock-in pledge is the right call if Nvidia wants developers to keep publishing there; it also means the payoff shows up in ecosystem influence and data, not near-term revenue synergy, and it should be judged on that timeline, not this quarter's numbers.