NVIDIA reportedly buying Hugging Face for $12.9B, reshaping open-source AI

TheTuringPost · x · 2026-09-04

TheTuringPost claims NVIDIA is acquiring Hugging Face for $12.9 billion (unverified rumor, no official confirmation), framing it as the culmination of NVIDIA's shift on open source: in 2012 Linus Torvalds called NVIDIA the worst company the Linux community had dealt with, but NVIDIA now maintains open Linux kernel modules and has released hundreds of open models and datasets.

The thread traces this transformation through a failed first chip, the massive CUDA bet, and one key realization: open source is extremely profitable when everything it enables creates more demand for your hardware. The author argues Jensen Huang, already the "inference king of AI," could become the "king of open AI" with Hugging Face under his umbrella.

Related event: Rumor: NVIDIA to acquire Hugging Face for ~$12.9B(2 posts)→

Original post →

More from Venture

Venture channel →