Nvidia has been in talks to acquire Hugging Face, the popular AI platform for sharing and building with open-source models, in what could be one of the chip giant's biggest deals yet. The two parties have had acquisition conversations in recent weeks about a deal that would value Hugging Face at more than $13 billion, according to a person familiar with the matter. The companies have not yet reached a deal, and the talks could still fall apart, the person said.

Nvidia has increasingly ramped up dealmaking with its enormous cash pile. The company said Wednesday that it has $18 billion committed to equity investments for the rest of its fiscal year, on top of $47.9 billion it already holds in private companies. Nvidia already has a relationship with Hugging Face.

The chipmaker participated in its $235 million funding round in 2023 that valued it at $4.5 billion. Hugging Face turned down a $500 million investment offer from Nvidia late last year that would have valued it at $7 billion, the Financial Times previously reported. Hugging Face said at the time it did not want a dominant investor that could sway decisions.

Hugging Face sits at the center of the open-source AI ecosystem, hosting millions of AI models and datasets that developers can build on. Owning the platform could give Nvidia a bigger foothold with those developers — and potentially drive more workloads onto its chips. Hugging Face was founded in 2016 by French entrepreneurs Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf.