Nvidia officially agreed to acquire Hugging Face, the de-facto hub of open-source AI (millions of models and datasets), for $12.93 billion — its second-largest deal ever after Groq's $20B (Dec 2025) and ~2.87x HF's last private valuation of $4.5B (2023). Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue told CNBC he approached Jensen Huang over the summer because open-source AI was 'at the turning point'; Nvidia promises the platform 'will remain an open platform' where 'Nvidia compute will not be required.'
Nvidia officially agreed to acquire Hugging Face, the de-facto hub of open-source AI (millions of models and datasets), for $12.93 billion — its second-largest deal ever after Groq's $20B (Dec 2025) and ~2.87x HF's last private valuation of $4.5B (2023). Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue told CNBC he approached Jensen Huang over the summer because open-source AI was 'at the turning point'; Nvidia promises the platform 'will remain an open platform' where 'Nvidia compute will not be required.'
WHAT HAPPENED: Nvidia announced this morning (Sep 3) that it has agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, via an official NVIDIA blog post from Jensen Huang and a CNBC Squawk Box interview with Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue. The deal timeline moved fast: Business Insider first reported HF working with a bank on a ~$13B sale on Aug 23; The Information reported an agreed $12.9B deal this week; confirmation came today. Delangue says HE approached Huang over the summer — "I think we realized that Hugging Face and open source AI in general was at the turning point, and that it needed more, more resources, more scale, more visibility" — adding Nvidia was "a perfect home" and that talks moved quickly.
KEY METRIC: $12.93B purchase price vs Hugging Face's last official valuation of $4.5B (2023 funding round Nvidia itself participated in) = 2.87x markup. Against ~$150M annualized revenue (The Information), Nvidia is paying roughly 86x sales. It is Nvidia's second-largest acquisition on record, behind only the $20B purchase of Groq assets in December 2025; Mellanox ($7B, 2019) was the previous peak.
COMPARISON: The FT previously reported Hugging Face REJECTED a $500M Nvidia investment last year that would have valued it at $7B — over concerns about a single dominant investor. Twelve months later, HF accepted full ownership at nearly double that valuation. The deal extends a remarkable balance-sheet offensive: Nvidia's Q2 FY27 revenue hit $96.2B (+18% QoQ), it has committed up to $100B to OpenAI data-center capacity, and its new "repeatable financing platform" with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR targets mobilizing $500B+ in third-party AI-infrastructure capital.
WHY IT MATTERS: This is vertical integration up the AI stack. As closed-model leaders OpenAI, Anthropic and Google push to build their own chips, Nvidia just bought the neutral distribution layer of open-source AI — the platform where the ecosystem's long tail hosts models, datasets and tools. Huang explicitly pledged openness: "Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem... Developers will choose the models they want, the frameworks they want, the clouds and inference service providers they want... Nvidia compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face." Whether that promise holds is now the single biggest trust question in open-source AI. NVDA shares edged higher on the news.
Ondo Finance launched Ondo Intelligent Portfolios, a new onchain product category delivering portfolios built on strategies developed by BlackRock for Ondo as single transferable tokens. Three tokens went live today — High Income, Diversified Growth, High Growth — with smart-contract-level rebalancing, available to eligible investors outside the US.
US spot bitcoin ETFs have swung to net inflows of roughly $320M for 2026 (Bloomberg tally; ~$349M per Askthetape) — the first positive year-to-date print since April — after investors added about $4.6B since Aug 19, erasing a $5.69B deficit accumulated by July 13. BlackRock's IBIT captured ~$1.02B over four sessions as Bitcoin rallied ~35% from ~$64,100 to an eight-month high of $87,265.
On Monday, Sept 21, the European Central Bank switched on Pontes, a platform linking distributed-ledger markets to the Eurosystem's TARGET Services so eligible banks and market infra providers can settle tokenized bonds and funds in central-bank money. Christine Lagarde announced the go-live at Friday's Eurogroup, calling it 'a digital euro made available for banks.' It lands three days after the SEC's Innovation Exemption opened onchain trading of tokenized US stocks — the institutional tokenization race is now transatlantic.