Summary
Nvidia has confirmed its acquisition of Hugging Face in a deal valued at approximately $13 billion, and Bloomberg Tech sat down with Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolfe to break down the mechanics. Wolfe confirmed that all co-founders are staying on board under six-year retention agreements, and the platform will continue operating as an open, compute-agnostic infrastructure — meaning users will face no mandatory requirement to use Nvidia hardware going forward.
Wolfe revealed that Hugging Face approached Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang directly, describing deep mission alignment around open-source AI development. The platform currently hosts 3 million models, serves 18 million users, and supports 200,000 companies — built on less than $500 million in total funding. The acquisition is framed as an acceleration of the existing open-source trajectory rather than a strategic pivot away from it.
The conversation also touched on Hugging Face’s robotics business, which Wolfe said drew surprising market attention, and the regulatory landscape for a deal of this scale. Antitrust scrutiny and the competitive response from other chip and cloud players were raised, with the $1 billion employee retention component highlighted as a key structural element of the transaction.
📺 Source: Bloomberg Tech · Published September 03, 2026
🏷️ Format: Interview
