Sep 14, 2026 · 26 min · 7 segments
NVIDIA has now confirmed its $12.9 billion acquisition of Hugging Face, validating one of the biggest recent reports to emerge from the AI industry. In this TechStack episode, the team discusses why…
It's a wild thing.
And yeah, we should underscore that this has not been officially announced by either company.
But, you know, there are confirmed, allegedly confirmed reports from the Information, which is very reputable, obviously, publication, as well as Reuters.
and also reputable.
And again, as you noted, they're saying the deal is done.
It's interesting.
There's two very important aspects to this.
have to remember that nvidia has invested in hugging face significantly with their dgx cloud platform to support uh hugging face and um and and and help it grow and thrive uh to the you know open weight open model uh amazing ecosystem that it is today um and and really just a an absolute you know i don't even it's a wilderness of of software development uh contributions from all around the world so it's it's really just a very powerful platform and so nvidia you know wants to be you know wants to take care of that help it help it continue, help it grow.
They had a security incident fairly recently.
There's all kinds of resources that are required to keep this kind of repository alive and well.
I guess the question becomes is, what does NVIDIA do with with Hugging Face, once they have control and ownership, they're committed to the open source community, obviously, the company is.
And so there's all of those things.
But what are the competitive sort of ramifications of this? I think that's some of the questions that are rolling around in my head.
But it's an amazing sort of thing.
I guess I didn't see it coming.
And I wonder what you guys think about the potential competitively for this or just where this goes, how this evolves from here.
Yeah.
Hey, Hey Dave.
So I'll jump in there real quick because there are, there is already, uh, there is already kind of some backlash and some community, um, pushback.
And I would consider this as analogous, obviously not the same different situation, all that stuff, but it is analogous to when Nvidia tried to acquire arm.
Right.
Um, because it's, it's a similar type of concern where hugging it's, it's a neutrality concern when you have a player.
It's a wild thing.
And yeah, we should underscore that this has not been officially announced by either company.
But, you know, there are confirmed, allegedly confirmed reports from the Information, which is very reputable, obviously, publication, as well as Reuters.
and also reputable.
And again, as you noted, they're saying the deal is done.
It's interesting.
There's two very important aspects to this.
have to remember that nvidia has invested in hugging face significantly with their dgx cloud platform to support uh hugging face and um and and and help it grow and thrive uh to the you know open weight open model uh amazing ecosystem that it is today um and and really just a an absolute you know i don't even it's a wilderness of of software development uh contributions from all around the world so it's it's really just a very powerful platform and so nvidia you know wants to be you know wants to take care of that help it help it continue, help it grow.
They had a security incident fairly recently.
There's all kinds of resources that are required to keep this kind of repository alive and well.
I guess the question becomes is, what does NVIDIA do with with Hugging Face, once they have control and ownership, they're committed to the open source community, obviously, the company is.
And so there's all of those things.
But what are the competitive sort of ramifications of this? I think that's some of the questions that are rolling around in my head.
But it's an amazing sort of thing.
I guess I didn't see it coming.
And I wonder what you guys think about the potential competitively for this or just where this goes, how this evolves from here.
Yeah.
Hey, Hey Dave.
So I'll jump in there real quick because there are, there is already, uh, there is already kind of some backlash and some community, um, pushback.
And I would consider this as analogous, obviously not the same different situation, all that stuff, but it is analogous to when Nvidia tried to acquire arm.
Right.
Um, because it's, it's a similar type of concern where hugging it's, it's a neutrality concern when you have a player.
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