Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive, wrote that the company’s acquisition of Hugging Face would expand access to artificial intelligence for developers and institutions worldwide.
Nvidia announced the nearly $13 billion deal in September. Hugging Face is an open-source platform where users can host and test AI models, and it sells infrastructure and collaboration tools.
At the time of the announcement, Nvidia said Hugging Face was used by more than 18 million people and more than 200,000 companies. It said users had shared at least 3 million models on the platform, which hosted 500,000 datasets.
The US Department of Justice is now examining whether the acquisition could weaken competition in AI. Reuters first reported the inquiry on Wednesday.
Department officials have asked how the transaction could alter the position of Nvidia’s competitors. Their concern is that the purchase could give Nvidia control over a key distribution point and allow it to secure a channel for its own products.
The acquisition was Nvidia’s second-biggest purchase. Its biggest was the $20 billion purchase of Groq assets in December of 2025, a transaction that has also drawn Justice Department scrutiny.
The Hugging Face inquiry forms part of a larger three-year investigation into Nvidia’s conduct. The department has also looked at Nvidia’s purchase of SchedMD, whose software is used to run supercomputers with ties to national security, and whether Nvidia offered larger allocations of AI chips to customers that also bought its networking hardware.
Nvidia promised to keep supporting SchedMD software during that wider investigation. It has also confirmed that, once the Hugging Face purchase is completed, it will continue to support a range of chip and AI providers.
Hugging Face is expected to formally join Nvidia in the first half of 2027.
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