Hugging Face built a $4.5 billion empire on free AI models. Now Nvidia is buying it for $12.9 billion

Free was always the pitch, not the business model. Someone was going to cash the check eventually, and it turns out that someone is Nvidia.

Thomas Wolf has spent a decade convincing the world that open-source AI is not a charity project. On August 27, 2026, the market settled the argument. Nvidia agreed to buy Hugging Face, the company famous for hosting the open-source AI ecosystem with more than 3 million open-source LLMs, for $12.9 billion, according to The Information, […] This story continues at The Next Web

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