Catenaa, Thursday, August 27, 2026- Nvidia is nearing an agreement to acquire Hugging Face in a deal that would value the AI startup at roughly $13 billion.
The two sides have held serious conversations about a transaction in recent weeks, Business Insider said Wednesday.
A separate report from The Information said that Nvidia had reached an agreement to buy the business for $12.9 billion.
Nvidia has made a flurry of deals in the past year, including a recent $6 billion licensing agreement with startup Poolside that involved extending job offers to many of that company’s employees. It also reportedly paid about $20 billion for most of the chip startup Groq.
During an interview on the Bloomberg Tech show, Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf declined to comment on the reports. When asked whether the co-founders had considered selling the company generally, he said that Hugging Face has always attracted interest, including “offers of acquisition and investment.”
Hugging Face, which makes AI software and hosts it for other companies, was at the center of a cybersecurity incident in which a model being tested by OpenAI inadvertently hacked the platform. The breach raised alarms about the safety of cutting-edge AI technology.
OpenAI said Wednesday it could have reacted sooner to prevent the attack on Hugging Face’s systems.
Nvidia was already a backer of Hugging Face, alongside Alphabet’s Google, Amazon, Intel, Salesforce and others. Founded in 2016, the startup operates a popular platform for sharing AI models that can be used freely by others.
Hugging Face was valued at $4.5 billion in a funding round three years ago.
Nvidia, the world’s most valuable company, is the leading maker of AI accelerators, the chips that help train and operate models. It has gradually added a variety of other technologies, including software, with the goal of expanding the AI economy.
The Santa Clara, California-based company gave a surprisingly strong sales forecast for fiscal 2028 on Wednesday, saying revenue would grow about 70%.
