Nvidia’s planned $13 billion acquisition of Hugging Face, its second-largest deal after a $20 billion purchase of Groq assets, faced a leadership change on 12 November when Jensen Huang resigned as chief executive and Hugging Face chief Clément Delangue vowed to keep fighting for open-source AI, TechCrunch reported.
Key points
- Delangue said Hugging Face would keep fighting for open-source AI after Huang’s exit.
- Nvidia pledged to preserve open support on Hugging Face, a platform for hosting and distributing AI models.
- US officials began asking about the acquisition’s effect on AI competition in October.
- Colette Kress has taken over as Nvidia’s interim chief executive.
Delangue responds to Huang’s departure
Hugging Face hosts and distributes open-source AI models. Nvidia announced its plan to buy the platform in September. Delangue made his pledge in a post on X on 12 November, calling Huang’s departure “a really sad day” and saying the company would “keep fighting for open-source AI, harder than ever”.
The Associated Press reported that Nvidia appointed executive vice-president and chief financial officer Colette Kress interim chief executive. TechCrunch named the interim chief as Collette Kress. Huang’s departure and the interim appointment were also covered in AI Affairs’ report on the leadership change.
Huang had publicly supported open-source AI while leading Nvidia. His departure changes the leadership of the company that has agreed to buy Hugging Face, whose chief executive has now restated its commitment to open-source AI. Nvidia’s pledge about the platform’s open support was made under Huang.
Nvidia’s $13 billion platform purchase
The Hugging Face transaction would follow Nvidia’s $20 billion purchase of Groq assets in December 2025. TechCrunch described the planned Hugging Face acquisition as the second-largest in Nvidia’s history, behind that assets purchase.
Nvidia has pledged that Hugging Face would preserve open support, according to TechCrunch. The acquisition would also put a major channel for distributing AI models under Nvidia’s control. Those two features of the deal matter to the organisations that use the platform to make models available and to obtain them.
The US Department of Justice began asking how the acquisition could affect competition in the AI market in October, TechCrunch reported, citing Reuters. AI Affairs has covered the department’s questions about the planned purchase.
Delangue’s pledge concerns the platform’s approach to open-source AI. Nvidia’s commitment concerns support on that platform after the purchase. The competition questions concern what happens when the chipmaker gains control of a distribution channel used across the AI market.
Huang’s July letter and Nvidia’s Poolside deal
Huang published a policy letter on X on 24 July urging the US government not to over-restrict open-weight models. It was signed by 25 companies, including Microsoft, Meta, Hugging Face, IBM and Palantir. The letter described such models as ones people can download, inspect, modify and run on their own infrastructure.
Huang argued in the letter that open-weight models give customers more control over their AI systems and reduce dependence on a single provider. That position extended beyond Nvidia’s proposed ownership of Hugging Face: it asked for a wider policy approach to models made available for others to run.
In August, Nvidia announced a $6 billion deal with coding startup Poolside to build an open AI ecosystem in the United States. Nvidia also expanded its Nemotron open-weight model family in October with a 120-billion-parameter model for enterprise agents and two smaller Bolt models that run on PCs.
Nvidia is scheduled to close its planned Hugging Face acquisition in the first half of 2027.
