Hugging Face approached Nvidia’s Huang weeks ahead of $12.9B acquisition, CEO tells CNBC

Nvidia's reported $12.9 billion acquisition of Hugging Face would bring one of AI's main model and dataset hubs under the leading supplier of AI chips. Hugging Face's CEO told CNBC that the company approached Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang only weeks before the deal, suggesting negotiations moved quickly. Huang said Nvidia plans to use Hugging Face to "expand access to AI for developers and institutions worldwide." For builders, the practical questions are whether Hugging Face will remain an open, hardware-neutral platform and how Nvidia ownership could affect model distribution, hosted inference, enterprise tooling, and support for competing accelerators. Pricing, product changes, and the transaction timeline were not disclosed in the provided report.