Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue described Thursday as a “really sad day” following the announcement that Nvidia had decided to drop its plan to acquire the platform for open-source AI models. The deal, originally valued at $12.9 billion, would have made it the second-largest purchase in Nvidia’s history, trailing only the $20 billion acquisition of chipmaker Groq’s assets in December 2025.
“This whole thing sucks, and I wish none of it had happened. It’s a really sad day! But I want to make one thing clear: we’ll keep fighting for open-source AI, harder than ever. This is too important to slow down now. Let’s go!,” Delangue wrote on X.
The statement suggests that the departure of Jensen Huang worries advocates in the open-source community. Delangue is offering reassurance that the fight will continue regardless of the acquisition outcome.
Under Huang’s leadership as Nvidia CEO, the company was a strong supporter of open-source AI and open-weight models. Concerns now focus on how the organisation will approach this space without his direct influence.
Following Nvidia’s initial announcement to buy Hugging Face, the U.S. Department of Justice began investigating the deal’s impact on market competition, Reuters reported in October. Nvidia had pledged to maintain open support for the platform while also gaining control over a major distribution channel for AI models.
The transaction remains scheduled to close in the first half of 2027. Requests for further comment on the deal status and whether Hugging Face has spoken with Nvidia’s interim CEO Collette Kress were not returned.
Huang’s support for open-source and open-weight AI extended well beyond Hugging Face. In July, he published an AI policy letter as his first post on the social network X. The letter, signed by 25 companies including Microsoft, Meta, Hugging Face, IBM, and Palantir, urged the U.S. government not to over-restrict open-weight AI models.
The letter argued that models which “anyone can download, inspect, modify, and run on their own infrastructure” are a vital part of the AI ecosystem. It stated that such models make artificial intelligence “more accessible, adaptable, and widely available.”
Huang also noted that open-weight models expand access to the AI economy, strengthen competition, and give customers greater control by preventing lock-in to a single provider. His post on X added that open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty.
In August, Nvidia announced a $6 billion deal with coding startup Poolside to help build an open AI ecosystem in the U.S. to compete against Chinese companies like DeepSeek and Kimi K3, The Wall Street Journal reported at the time. Last month, Nvidia expanded its Nemotron family of open-weight models with a large 120-billion-parameter model for enterprise agents and two new lightweight Bolt models that run on PCs.
Earlier this year, Huang promoted open-source AI during his January keynote address at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, noting that open-source models have “really revolutionized artificial intelligence.”
What it means
For developers and researchers relying on Hugging Face, the platform’s core mission remains unchanged. The company will continue to host and distribute open models, though the specific strategic backing from Nvidia under Huang is now uncertain. Users should expect the existing infrastructure to persist through the 2027 closing date, but any future shifts in how models are prioritised or distributed will depend on Nvidia’s interim leadership team.
