DOJ opens inquiry into NVIDIA's $12.93B Hugging Face acquisition

According to Reuters and CNBC, antitrust staff are probing the $12.93B deal. Their concern is that Hugging Face hosts nearly 3 million models and serves as the default distribution hub for open weights, including Meta's Muse Spark Open.

NVIDIA already supplies most of the training hardware and increasingly ships its own models, such as Nemotron. Owning the dominant model hub would make it a vertically integrated platform.

NVIDIA's open, multi-vendor pledge is the key promise regulators will test. The open-weight community is watching closely, especially as most major open models now come from China.

What to watch: whether the inquiry escalates to a second request, which would signal a deeper review.