Nvidia’s $12.9B for Hugging Face, in seven charts
The valuation ladder, how the price compares, and Nvidia’s journey to major VC player.
Hugging Face: From a $1.8M seed in 2016 to a reported $12.9B sale
Post-money valuation at each of Hugging Face's seven rounds, then the reported sale price, which is not confirmed and not closed.
Source: Dealroom.co
Who founded Hugging Face
Source: Dealroom.co
Hugging Face raised $395.7M across seven rounds and was last valued at $4.5B in August 2023. Nvidia is already a shareholder: it joined the $235M Series D that set that valuation, alongside Amazon, Google, Salesforce, Qualcomm, Intel, IBM and AMD. betaworks backed the company in all four of its earliest rounds.
Who owns Hugging Face
Dealroom's estimate of who owns Hugging Face, and what each stake would be worth at the reported $12.9B price. Nvidia already holds about 3%.
Source: Dealroom.co estimates
Split by investor, the earliest money multiplied most: Dealroom estimates investors would share about $7.7B at the reported price, roughly 20 times the $395M they put in, before fees and taxes.
Money in and estimated money out, by investor
Dealroom's estimate of what each holder's stake would be worth at a $12.9B sale, and the estimated cheques behind the early fund positions. Illustrative gross values — the legal cap table, individual cheques and deal terms are not public.
Source: Dealroom.co estimates
Hugging Face would be Nvidia's second-biggest acquisition ever
Source: Dealroom.co
Hugging Face generated an estimated $150M in annualised revenue, so $12.9B is roughly 86 times revenue. That is high against the recent run of AI and software acquisitions, and short of the two highest.
86× revenue, against other recent AI and software deals
Source: Dealroom.co
Between Mellanox in 2019 and Enfabrica in 2025, Nvidia bought nothing larger than $700M. Its regular acquisitions are small, technical and mostly undisclosed, and they cluster on one problem: getting more work out of a fleet of GPUs.
Nvidia: 21 startup acquisitions since 2022
Source: Dealroom.co
Buying companies is the smaller half of what Nvidia does with startups. The larger half is minority investment, and it has grown faster than the acquisitions have. Since 2022 it has taken part in 297 venture rounds worth $278B in total, and 84 rounds worth $206B in 2026 alone. Those are the full round sizes, not Nvidia's own cheques, which are rarely disclosed — three 2026 rounds account for most of the figure: OpenAI at $122B, Anthropic at $30B and xAI at $20B.
Nvidia as a VC investor
Number of VC rounds with Nvidia participation. Includes NVentures.
Source: Dealroom.co · 2026 data to 27 Aug + annualised projection