NVIDIA has agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.9 billion — the closest thing the AI industry has to neutral ground. The deal isn't closed yet, it faces a genuine antitrust gauntlet, and the company that owns roughly three-quarters to nine-tenths of the AI chip market now also owns the platform where the rest of the industry discovers, evaluates, and ships its models. NVIDIA confirmed on September 3, 2026 that it has agreed to acquire Hugging Face, the platform that hosts three million models, half a million datasets, roughly a million applications, and the discovery layer used by over 18 million developers and 200,000-plus companies. ...