Nvidia’s $12.9B for Hugging Face, in seven charts
The valuation ladder, how the price compares, and Nvidia’s journey to major VC player.
Nvidia agreed on 2 September 2026 to buy Hugging Face for $12.9B: $11.9B to shareholders and up to $1B in Nvidia stock to keep staff. The deal needs regulatory approval and is expected to close in the first half of 2027. Nvidia says Hugging Face will stay open to every model and every chip maker, including its competitors.
What does Hugging Face actually do? It runs the online platform where AI models are stored and shared. A model is a large file, the result of training an AI; anyone can upload one, and anyone can download it and run it. The platform holds more than three million models and the data they were trained on, and about 18 million people use it. Hugging Face makes money by selling companies private versions of the platform and the computing to run their models, about $150M a year.
Hugging Face: From a $1.8M seed in 2016 to an agreed $12.9B sale
Post-money valuation at each of Hugging Face's seven rounds, then the agreed sale price, signed on 2 September 2026 and expected to close in the first half of 2027.
Source: Dealroom.co
Who owns Hugging Face
Dealroom's estimate of who owns Hugging Face, and what each stake would be worth at the agreed $12.9B price. Nvidia already holds about 3%.
Source: Dealroom.co estimates
Split by investor, the earliest money multiplied most: Dealroom estimates investors would share about $7.7B at the agreed price, roughly 20 times the $395M they put in, before fees and taxes.
Money in and estimated money out in Nvidia's $12.9B Hugging Face deal
Dealroom's illustrative gross estimates — the legal cap table, individual cheques and deal terms are not public. Hollow markers show the entry round where the cheque is not estimable.
Source: Dealroom.co estimates
Hugging Face would be Nvidia's second-biggest acquisition ever
Source: Dealroom.co
Hugging Face generated an estimated $150M in annualised revenue, so $12.9B is roughly 86 times revenue. That is high against the recent run of AI and software acquisitions, and short of the two highest.
86× revenue, against other recent AI and software deals
Source: Dealroom.co
Between Mellanox in 2019 and Enfabrica in 2025, Nvidia bought nothing larger than $700M. Its regular acquisitions are small, technical and mostly undisclosed, and they cluster on one problem: getting more work out of a fleet of GPUs.
Nvidia: 21 startup acquisitions since 2022
Source: Dealroom.co
Buying companies is the smaller half of what Nvidia does with startups. The larger half is minority investment, and it has grown faster than the acquisitions have. Since 2022 it has taken part in 297 venture rounds worth $278B in total, and 84 rounds worth $206B in 2026 alone. Those are the full round sizes, not Nvidia's own cheques, which are rarely disclosed — three 2026 rounds account for most of the figure: OpenAI at $122B, Anthropic at $30B and xAI at $20B.
Nvidia as a VC investor
Number of VC rounds with Nvidia participation. Includes NVentures.
Source: Dealroom.co · 2026 data to 27 Aug + annualised projection