Is Hugging Face a subsidiary of NVIDIA?

Not yet. NVIDIA signed a definitive agreement to acquire Hugging Face in September 2026, but the transaction was still pending regulatory approval as of October 1, 2026. Hugging Face remains an independent company until closing.

When was Hugging Face founded?

The company and brand were founded in September 2016 in New York City. The NVIDIA acquisition agreement came ten years later, in September 2026.

What is Hugging Face's market position?

Hugging Face is the largest open machine learning platform, with more than one million public models and roughly five million registered users. It is the de facto standard registry for open AI models.

Technology & Software

Who Owns Hugging Face?

Q: Is Hugging Face publicly traded?

No. Hugging Face, Inc. is privately held. If the NVIDIA acquisition closes, the brand will sit inside a public company listed on Nasdaq under NVDA.

Q: Who founded Hugging Face?

Clement Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf co-founded the company. Delangue serves as CEO, Chaumond as CTO, and Wolf as chief science officer.

Hugging Face is the consumer-facing platform and brand of Hugging Face, Inc., a privately held AI company founded in 2016 and headquartered in Brooklyn, New York. The brand covers the Hub, the Transformers library, and associated open source tools. In September 2026, NVIDIA signed a definitive agreement to acquire the company for approximately $11.9 billion, pending regulatory approval.

Parent Company

Hugging Face, Inc.

Founded

2016

Status

Private

Headquarters

Brooklyn, New York, United States

GlobalOfficial Website

Who Owns Hugging Face?

Parent Company: Hugging Face, Inc.
Ownership Type: Wholly owned
Company Type: Privately Held

Brand	Parent Company	Ownership Type
Hugging Face	Hugging Face, Inc.	Wholly owned

History of Hugging Face

Founded: 2016
Founders: Clement Delangue, Julien Chaumond, Thomas Wolf

The brand began in 2016 as a chatbot app for teenagers, named after the hugging face emoji. When the founders open sourced the model behind the app, developers adopted the tooling faster than the consumer product. The company pivoted to a platform for machine learning.

The Transformers library became the brand's signature product after 2018, standardizing how developers download and run language models. The Hub followed, growing into a registry for models, datasets, and interactive Spaces demos.

By 2025 the Hub passed one million public models. The brand expanded into inference services, enterprise features, and robotics through the LeRobot project and the Pollen Robotics acquisition. The NVIDIA agreement in September 2026 marked the largest ownership event in the brand's history.

About Hugging Face, Inc.

What does Hugging Face do?

Hugging Face operates the Hub, the largest repository of open machine learning models, datasets, and demos. It also maintains the Transformers library and sells enterprise hosting and compute services. Researchers and companies use it to share, discover, and deploy AI models.

Is Hugging Face publicly traded?

No. Hugging Face is a private company. In September 2026 it signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by NVIDIA, a public company traded on Nasdaq under NVDA. The transaction was still pending as of October 1, 2026.

Who founded Hugging Face?

Clement Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf founded the company in New York in September 2016. All three remain with the company as CEO, CTO, and chief science officer.

Where is Hugging Face headquartered?

The company is headquartered in Brooklyn, New York, at 20 Jay Street, and maintains a major office in Paris, France. Its workforce is distributed across more than 40 countries.