Nvidia to acquire Hugging Face

Hugging Face has no path to substantial profitability and the investors and employees want liquidity. Nvidia doesn't want this to look like a bubble pop (as they have lots of GPU data center build outs to complete), they've got plenty of cash on hand, and they're an extremely good natural fit for the company.

Nvidia is seeing its top frontier model customers develop their own chips to sidestep Nvidia and as a counter, Nvidia is investing in the open source ecosystem. Open source means more competition and more demand for GPUs rather than single all-powerful labs that can will their own chips into existence and begin to push Nvidia aside. Plus Nvidia is betting big on local inference for robotics. All of this is bolstered by open source.

It's not like you can't just post model weights anywhere. There's really no lock in that Hugging Face has.

If you're looking for real monopoly issues that distort market economics and make it hard to compete without paying taxes to your competitor, consider Google's ownership of 92% of URL bars or the Google / Apple duopoly of smart phone software distribution.

Re: Nvidia to acquire Hugging Face

#6

Post by hmokiguess » Thu, Sep 03, 2026, 1:13 PM UTC

unddoch wrote: post #3

Theoretically, can Nvidia direct Hugging Face to sue OpenAI now for the hack? Surely they could find some interesting stuff in discovery :)

I was also theorizing that part of their acquisition was to get more intel on that, though I feel like in practice that whole thing right now is just theatre for inflating the cybersec market

Re: Nvidia to acquire Hugging Face

#7

Post by oh_no » Thu, Sep 03, 2026, 1:18 PM UTC

hmokiguess wrote: post #6

unddoch wrote: post #3

Theoretically, can Nvidia direct Hugging Face to sue OpenAI now for the hack? Surely they could find some interesting stuff in discovery :)

I was also theorizing that part of their acquisition was to get more intel on that, though I feel like in practice that whole thing right now is just theatre for inflating the cybersec market

the last thing nvidia would want is to make ai look more legally risky

to say nothing of their massive investments direct and indirect in openai

Re: Nvidia to acquire Hugging Face

#8

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Sep 03, 2026, 1:19 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Nvidia to acquire Hugging Face

#9

Post by cmiles8 » Thu, Sep 03, 2026, 1:25 PM UTC

Not sure why this is news again this week when it was already announced previously. NYTimes was also reporting this like it was news today.

Re: Nvidia to acquire Hugging Face

#10

Post by retinaros » Thu, Sep 03, 2026, 1:25 PM UTC

Life changing for engineers having joined a few year ago. Congrats