The U.S. Department of Justice is investigating Nvidia's acquisition of Hugging Face.

October 29 - According to Reuters, the U.S. Department of Justice has launched an investigation into the impact of Nvidia's acquisition of open-source AI model platform Hugging Face on AI competition, as well as Nvidia's business practices. Reuters, citing two people familiar with the matter, reported that Justice Department officials asked whether the approximately $12.9 billion deal would give Nvidia control of a key distribution hub in the AI sector, and whether Nvidia could use Hugging Face to harm competitors or use it as a bargaining chip; officials also asked questions about Hugging Face's competitors.

The people familiar with the matter said the Justice Department's recent investigation has a broad scope, covering Nvidia's acquisitions and investments, sales practices, and whether it pressured customers. The investigation was initiated during the Biden administration and has continued into the Trump administration; Reuters said it saw no indication that President Trump had intervened. According to another person familiar with the matter, the Justice Department also examined whether Nvidia, after obtaining a technology license from chip startup Groq and absorbing core engineers, allocated more AI chips to customers that purchased both networking equipment and Groq processors; the December 2025 acquisition of SchedMD, as well as the Run:ai acquisition, had also come into the investigation's view. Reuters stressed that the investigation itself does not equal evidence of wrongdoing and may not necessarily lead to litigation. When Nvidia announced the acquisition of Hugging Face last month, it said the platform will continue to support cooperation with various semiconductor, cloud and AI vendors, and remain open to the entire AI ecosystem; the deal is expected to close in the first half of next year.