Nvidia eyes Hugging Face purchase to edge deeper into open-weight AI hub

Nvidia is reportedly moving forward with acquiring Hugging Face for about $12.9 billion, aiming to secure a leading cloud repository for open-weight AI models and strengthen its integration into the broader AI ecosystem. The deal isn’t finalized yet, with talks ongoing and other bidders (like Salesforce) and investors (including Google and Microsoft) linked to Hugging Face. If completed, the acquisition could bolster Nvidia’s hardware-software strategy and influence competition with OpenAI and Anthropic, while expanding Hugging Face’s role beyond language models into robotics and other AI applications.