US Department of Justice questions Nvidia's acquisition of Hugging Face: Can the distribution gateway for 3 million AI models remain neutral?

Beating AI News Flash: Nvidia announced in September the acquisition of Hugging Face for approximately $12.9 billion, which has now drawn inquiries from the U.S. Department of Justice. Regulators are concerned that Nvidia could use this to control a key distribution channel for AI models and leverage this advantage to squeeze out competitors.

Hugging Face is known as the "GitHub of AI," with over 18 million developers and 3 million models. Developers can find models, download weights, share datasets, and deploy AI applications here.

Nvidia has committed to keeping Hugging Face open after the acquisition and will not force developers to use its own GPUs. But even without blocking competitors, model recommendation order, default deployment tools, and the degree of support for different chips could still influence developers' choices.

The Hugging Face acquisition is expected to close in the first half of 2027, subject to regulatory approval.