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.

Who owns Hugging Face?

Hugging Face is owned by its founders, employees, and venture investors including Lux Capital, Sequoia, Coatue, Salesforce, Google, Amazon, and NVIDIA itself. If the pending acquisition closes, NVIDIA will own the company outright.

Did NVIDIA buy Hugging Face?

NVIDIA signed a definitive agreement on September 2, 2026, to acquire Hugging Face for approximately $11.9 billion plus retention equity. The deal was expected to close in the first half of 2027, subject to regulatory approvals. It had not closed as of October 1, 2026.

Clement Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf founded the company in New York in 2016. The original product was not infrastructure. It was a chatbot app aimed at teenagers, named after the hugging face emoji. The founders passed through the Betaworks program and raised early venture funding.

The pivot came when the team open sourced the model behind the chatbot. Developers adopted the tools faster than the app itself. By 2018 and 2019, the Transformers library had become a standard way to download and run natural language models, and Hugging Face refocused entirely on the platform.

Funding accelerated alongside adoption. The company raised a $40 million Series B in 2021, a $100 million Series C in 2022 at a roughly $2 billion valuation, and a $235 million Series D in August 2023 at a $4.5 billion valuation. That round included Salesforce Ventures, Google, Amazon, NVIDIA, Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, and IBM, an unusually broad syndicate of hardware and cloud rivals.

Through 2024 and 2025 the Hub grew past one million public models. The company expanded into inference endpoints, enterprise security features, and robotics data. LeRobot, its robotics effort, and the Pollen Robotics acquisition in 2025 signaled a push into embodied AI. Reported revenue reached roughly $150 million in 2025, modest against the valuation but rising quickly.

In August 2026, reports surfaced that NVIDIA was in talks to acquire the company. On September 2, 2026, the companies signed a definitive agreement valuing the deal at approximately $11.9 billion plus up to roughly $1 billion in employee retention equity. The agreement triggered Hart-Scott-Rodino review and was expected to close in the first half of 2027.

The NVIDIA acquisition is the main regulatory event. The Hart-Scott-Rodino filing in September 2026 opened a US antitrust review, and EU scrutiny was expected given European concerns about AI concentration. Critics argue the deal gives the dominant chip supplier control over open model distribution. The companies have said the Hub will remain open and that Hugging Face will keep operating as a platform.

Hugging Face has also faced periodic criticism over hosted content, including datasets with personal data and models used for deepfakes. The company has responded with gating, opt-out tools, and content policies rather than full removal.