Nvidia’s potential $13B acquisition of Hugging Face raises concerns for European tech

Nvidia is reportedly in talks to acquire Hugging Face, the open-source AI platform that has become something like GitHub for machine learning models, in a deal valued at roughly $13 billion. If completed, it would be the chipmaker’s largest acquisition ever and would hand one company control over both the chips that train AI models and the marketplace where millions of developers share them.

The deal in context

Hugging Face was last valued at $4.5 billion during a 2023 funding round. A $13 billion acquisition would represent roughly a 3x jump from that figure.

The company hosts more than 2 million public models and over 500,000 datasets. Its user base has swelled to around 13 million. And its annualized revenue hit approximately $150 million as of 2025, putting the proposed deal at an eye-watering 86-fold revenue multiple.

The deal would dwarf Nvidia’s previous record acquisition. Its $7 billion purchase of Mellanox in 2020, a networking technology company, was considered bold at the time. This one nearly doubles it.

Why Europe is nervous

Hugging Face was founded in 2016 by Clément Delangue, Thomas Wolf, and Julien Chaumond. While the company is headquartered in New York, its roots are French, and it maintains a significant engineering presence in Paris.

There’s also a practical question about neutrality. Hugging Face has thrived precisely because it’s been a vendor-agnostic platform. Developers working with AMD chips, Intel accelerators, or custom silicon from startups all use it. An Nvidia-owned Hugging Face would face immediate skepticism about whether it would continue to treat all hardware vendors equally, or whether subtle optimization advantages would start tilting toward Nvidia’s own GPUs.

The competitive landscape shifts

Nvidia wasn’t the only company circling Hugging Face. Microsoft reportedly held earlier acquisition talks with the platform, though those discussions have since gone quiet. Nvidia itself previously attempted a $500 million standalone investment that Hugging Face declined.

The fact that Hugging Face turned down a half-billion-dollar check and is now entertaining a full acquisition at $13 billion suggests either the strategic calculus changed or the number simply got large enough to override philosophical objections.

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