Nvidia has agreed to acquire AI platform Hugging Face for $12.9bn, according to reports, marking one of the biggest acquisitions of the generative AI era and giving the chip giant a stronger foothold in AI software. Founded in 2016 by French entrepreneurs Clément Delangue, Thomas Wolf and Julien Chaumond, Hugging Face is widely known as the "Git Hub of machine learning". Its platform allows developers to discover, share and deploy AI models, while championing open-source AI over the closed systems developed by companies such as Open AI and Anthropic.

The Information first reported the deal on Wednesday, citing a person familiar with the deal. Hugging Face last raised funding at a $4.5bn valuation in 2023, with backing from investors including Sequoia Capital and Coatue, as well as Google, Amazon, Nvidia, Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, IBM and Salesforce. Although headquartered in New York, Hugging Face has long presented itself as a French-American company, with its largest office in Paris.

Speaking to Sifted in 2024, cofounder Julien Chaumond said the company's global ambitions meant raising capital in the US was "unavoidable", even as it continued to build much of its engineering team in Europe. The acquisition would also deepen Nvidia's influence across the AI stack. Best known for its GPUs, which power the world's leading AI models, the tech giant has increasingly invested in software and developer tools as demand grows for open AI models and autonomous AI agents that require vast amounts of computing power.