Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) chief executive Jensen Huang defended the price of the company’s Hugging Face acquisition in a CNBC interview broadcast on 3 September 2026.
Huang put the figure at $12.9bn, telling the network: ‘$12.9 billion is what it took to close the deal, and it’s worth every single penny,’ according to a Reuters and AFP-sourced report of the interview.
Deal terms and the CEO’s case
Nvidia confirmed the same day that it had agreed to buy Hugging Face, the open-source AI model-sharing platform, in a deal CNBC valued at almost $13bn. Reuters and the Wall Street Journal both put the price at $13bn, while the New York Times used Huang’s own $12.9bn figure.
Huang also said Hugging Face would remain open to the wider AI ecosystem under Nvidia’s ownership, framing the acquisition as a way to scale the platform’s infrastructure rather than close it off, and endorsed the company’s open-source approach as the right one for the industry to follow.
Hugging Face chief executive Clément Delangue said the company had approached Huang over the summer, adding: ‘a few weeks later, here we are.’
Second-biggest bet after Groq
The deal is Nvidia’s second-largest purchase, behind only its roughly $20bn absorption of Groq’s assets late last year, CNBC reported. It also marks a steep repricing of Hugging Face itself: Nvidia took part in a $235m funding round in 2023 that valued the startup at just $4.5bn.
Huang has pointed to scale as the justification for the new price, citing Hugging Face’s 18 million developers, 200,000 enterprise customers and more than three million hosted models as reasons rival bidders were also circling the company.
Nvidia’s balance sheet has grown to support such deals. Quarterly net income reached $59.7bn in the three months to 26 July 2026, up from $58.3bn the prior quarter, according to its most recent 10-Q filing with the SEC.
Filings and the market’s muted response
Two Nvidia executives, Mark A. Stevens and Timothy S. Teter, filed Form 4 disclosures with the SEC on the evening of 2 September, hours before the acquisition was announced. Neither filing disclosed share counts or values.
Nvidia shares traded at $227.53 as of 3 September, up 0.94% on the day and roughly 1% over 20 days, with turnover running below the 20-day average, according to consolidated exchange data. That is a modest reaction for a deal Huang has publicly called worth every penny, and it leaves the stock within its recent range of $208.48 to $229.67.
The announcement lands against a backdrop of rising borrowing costs. The 10-year US Treasury yield stood at 4.79% on 1 September, up from 4.75% the prior session, a factor that tends to weigh on valuations for growth-heavy technology deals financed partly in cash.
Open-source concentration in question
Not everyone in the industry is convinced the tie-up strengthens the ecosystem Hugging Face built its name on. Analysts have split over whether folding the leading open-source AI hub into the dominant maker of AI chips broadens access, as Huang argues, or narrows it by putting a rival’s most-used developer platform under one commercial roof.
The deal follows a cybersecurity incident at Hugging Face earlier in 2026 that raised questions about the platform’s infrastructure, adding a further rationale for tighter ownership beyond the commercial logic Huang laid out on CNBC.
Nvidia has not set out a formal closing timetable in its public disclosures. Investors are likely to watch for a full SEC filing detailing deal structure and financing, alongside any regulatory response to a transaction that hands one company control of both leading AI chips and the platform much of the open-source AI community relies on to distribute its models.
This article is for information only and is not investment advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any asset. Markets move quickly; figures are correct as sourced at the time of writing. Always do your own research before making financial decisions.
