Thomas Wolf has spent a decade convincing the world that open-source AI is not a charity project. On August 27, 2026, the market settled the argument. Nvidia agreed to buy Hugging Face, the company famous for hosting the open-source AI ecosystem with more than 3 million open-source LLMs, for $12.9 billion, according to The Information, a price that values the ten-year-old startup at roughly 86 times its $150 million in annualized revenue and nearly triple the $4.5 billion valuation it fetched in 2023.
The deal is one of Nvidia’s largest acquisitions to date, leaked the same day the chipmaker reported $96.2 billion in quarterly revenue and forecasts a 70 percent jump in revenue next fiscal year and disclosed it has $18 billion committed to equity investments through 2027. At Nvidia’s current pace, $12.9 billion is about thirteen days of sales.
Nvidia is about to spend two weeks of revenue to secure the distribution layer for the one corner of AI it does not control: open source.
The irony is not lost on anyone who has followed the company. In January, the Financial Times reported that Hugging Face had turned down a $500 million investment from Nvidia at a $7 billion valuation, a signal that independence mattered more than a quick capital injection.
