Nvidia Just Bought Hugging Face for $12.9 Billion. The Open-Source AI Ecosystem Just Got a New Owner.

Nvidia signed a definitive deal to acquire Hugging Face — the GitHub of machine learning, 1M+ models, 3B downloads — for $12.9 billion, closing H1 2027. The company that makes the chips now owns the platform where models are discovered and distributed. We cover what that means for open-source AI, Claude Fable 5.1 shipping with self-verification in Cursor, and Nvidia's model beating the top human at the International Olympiad in Informatics.