NVIDIA says it has agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12,930,300,000, a deal that would put one of the central distribution points for open and open-weight AI models inside the dominant AI chip company.

Hugging Face has become core developer infrastructure for AI teams. NVIDIA said the platform is used by more than 18 million developers, researchers and creators, hosts more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets and 1 million applications, and is used by more than 200,000 companies to discover, evaluate, customize and deploy AI.

The company framed the acquisition around infrastructure scale rather than exclusivity. NVIDIA said Hugging Face will remain open to the wider AI ecosystem, including users who choose different models, frameworks, clouds, inference providers and computing platforms. It also said NVIDIA hardware will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face.

That promise is the key issue for developers. Hugging Face has been valuable partly because it sits above competing model builders, cloud providers and accelerator vendors. NVIDIA already publishes hundreds of models and datasets there, and said its infrastructure and engineering could improve reliability, safety, evaluation, inference and deployment.

TechCrunch and WIRED also reported the agreement and valuation. For open-source AI users, the practical question now is whether Hugging Face can keep its neutral platform role while gaining the resources of the company that supplies much of the compute behind modern AI development.