DOJ inquires into NVIDIA's $12.9B Hugging Face acquisition

According to Reuters sources, the US Department of Justice is inquiring into NVIDIA's $12.93B acquisition of Hugging Face. Investigators are asking whether owning the leading open-model hub would give NVIDIA leverage over a core distribution point for AI models and tools.

The concern is vertical. NVIDIA dominates AI accelerators; Hugging Face hosts nearly 3 million public model repositories and is where most open weights, including this week's Mistral Large 4 and Meta's Muse Spark, are published. Regulators may ask whether NVIDIA could favor its own hardware formats, NIM microservices or Nemotron models in discovery and tooling, or disadvantage rival chips. The inquiry runs alongside a years-long antitrust probe into NVIDIA's conduct, and the deal is expected to close in the first half of 2027.

NVIDIA continues to lean into open models. It released Nemotron 3.5 Transcribe, a 30B open transcription model supporting 40 languages, and a 9.6M-parameter audio cleanup model on Hugging Face this week. That gives it a credible story that it supports the open ecosystem, but also shows how much of its own work flows through the platform it wants to buy.

Community reaction is worried: developers fear a GPU vendor controlling the main open-model hub. An inquiry is not a lawsuit, so watch for a second request or remedies such as neutrality commitments.