DOJ probes NVIDIA's $12.9B Hugging Face acquisition

Bloomberg, citing Reuters, reports that the DOJ has begun inquiring into NVIDIA's $12.9 billion acquisition of Hugging Face. Investigators are focused on whether owning the dominant hub for open models, datasets and Spaces would let NVIDIA steer distribution toward its own hardware and software stack or disadvantage rival chipmakers.

Hugging Face's position is unusual. It is neutral infrastructure for most of the open-model ecosystem: this week alone, Meta's Muse Spark Open and coverage of Mistral Large 4 ran through it. NVIDIA could, in theory, prioritize CUDA-optimized formats, NIM integrations or its own Nemotron models in discovery and tooling. Critics argue that kind of vertical integration is what antitrust review exists to examine.

The probe adds to scrutiny of NVIDIA's expanding equity web, including a $3B investment in Meta tied to Muse model optimization and multi-gigawatt Vera Rubin deals with Oracle. Regulators have grown more alert to AI vertical integration across compute, models and distribution.

An inquiry is not a lawsuit, and the deal may still close with remedies such as neutrality commitments. Separately, Hugging Face is dealing with a resurfaced GPU-hijacking malware campaign on the Hub, a reminder that it is critical infrastructure. Watch for a second-request escalation and statements from AMD and other chipmakers.