Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang delivers a speech during the Computex 2026 exhibition in Taipei, Taiwan on June 1, 2026.Chiang Ying-ying/AP
On Thursday, Nvidia, the tech giant that develops chips that power AI tools like ChatGPT, announced its acquisition of Hugging Face for nearly $13 billion amid an arms race to dominate every level of the industry.
Well, specifically, the cost was $12,930,300,000, with 129,303 apparently being the character encoding for the 🤗 emoji, which the startup Nvidia acquired is named after.
Hugging Face is the venture that broke into AI safety discussions when OpenAI’s advanced system breached its platform while undergoing a test. Since then, Hugging Face CEO and co-founder Clément Delangue has propelled a publicity campaign to support open-source AI. His startup is a community platform for millions of open-source AI models that anyone can use, modify, and share (many models are free to download).
Per a chart Delangue posted on X, Hugging Face’s library skyrocketed with almost 60 percent more data uploads in the first two weeks after news of the breach by OpenAI became public, and last month, Meta released its new open model on Hugging Face.
It certainly looks like it pays to be breached by OpenAI.
For Nvidia, the acquisition is another move toward vertical integration. The company is also throwing money into data centers, offering up to $105 billion to help OpenAI lease an Ohio data center, which is still under construction but is expected to be the world’s largest.
Nvidia CEO and co-founder Jensen Huang has also positioned the company as a proponent of open-source models—such as the millions Hugging Face shares—for what it calls ensuring safety with the technology. This stance is opposed to startups like OpenAI and Anthropic who have lobbied Washington against open models over fears of losing the ability to protect against misuse of their products and preserving their economic value.
As AI providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google try to make their own AI chips to reduce their reliance on Nvidia, Nvidia looks to add open-source models that compete with the AI providers.
“Together, we will make A.I. more open, more capable and more accessible to people and institutions around the world,” wrote Huang in his announcement of the acquisition. What his ideas of “more capable” and “more accessible” mean for the future is anyone’s guess.
Disclosure: The Center for Investigative Reporting, the parent company of Mother Jones, has sued OpenAI for copyright violations. OpenAI denies the allegations.
