Nvidia co-founder, president and CEO Jensen Huang gestures during a press conference on October 13, 2026 in Paris.
Joel Saget | AFP | Getty Images
Nvidia is facing questions from the U.S. Department of Justice about its acquisition of Hugging Face, an open source platform for hosting and testing AI models, and how the deal will affect competitors in the space.
CNBC confirmed the details of the investigation to a person familiar with the matter, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly. Reuters first reported the Justice Department investigation on Wednesday.
Nvidia announced in September that it would acquire Hugging Face for about $13 billion, with CEO Jensen Huang writing at the time that the deal would help “expand access to AI for developers and institutions around the world.”
Hugface has already been adopted at scale. At the time of the deal, NVIDIA said in a press statement that more than 18 million people and 200,000 companies reportedly used Hugging Face to share at least 3 million models and 500,000 datasets.
Hugging Face also sells infrastructure and collaboration tools to organizations working with closed, proprietary AI, including chip companies.
The acquisition of Hugging Face is the second largest acquisition for Nvidia, which paid $20 billion for Groq assets late last year, a deal that has also drawn scrutiny from the Justice Department. The closest thing to Hugging Face’s business is GitHub, the software repository that Microsoft acquired in 2018 for $7.5 billion.
Hugging Face has been resurfaced after reports that an OpenAI agent attacked the platform during testing.
The company and its case are part of a new Netflix “Insta-documentary” called “AI Gone Rogue.”
Nvidia declined to comment.
