Hugging Face CEO vows to keep fighting for open source AI after Jensen Huang’s exit

Nvidia agreed in September to buy Hugging Face, the main hub for open AI models, for $12.9 billion. TechCrunch reports the deal is still slated to close in the first half of 2027. The executive who championed it, and who pushed hard for open-weight AI in Washington, is now gone.

Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue called it a really sad day and promised to keep fighting for open source harder than ever. The subtext is clear: people who rely on open models are asking whether Nvidia's commitment was a company strategy or one leader's conviction.

We think open-weight models are among the most useful things in AI right now. They let researchers inspect systems, let companies run models on their own infrastructure, and keep the market from collapsing into a few closed providers. Nvidia's former CEO made exactly that case in a July policy letter signed by 25 companies, arguing open models strengthen competition, safety and sovereignty. Losing that voice at the top of the most important AI hardware company is a real setback for the open camp.

The question now is structural. TechCrunch notes the Justice Department has been asking how the acquisition would affect competition, because it would hand Nvidia control of a major distribution channel for AI models. With a strong founder in charge, the bet was that his values would protect Hugging Face's neutrality. Without him, the deal looks more like a chip giant owning the shelf where everyone else's models sit. That is a fair concern, and it should get sharper scrutiny, not less.

There are reasons for some optimism. Nvidia's open work runs deeper than one person: TechCrunch points to the $6 billion Poolside deal to build an American open AI ecosystem and the recent expansion of the Nemotron open-weight family, including a 120-billion-parameter model for enterprise agents. Selling chips is easier when lots of people build and run lots of models, so openness still serves Nvidia's interests.

I'm watching whether interim leadership reaffirms the open-model strategy in public, and whether Hugging Face gets binding commitments on neutrality before closing. A cheerful post on X is not governance. If the platform's openness rests only on goodwill, the open-source community should push for more.

TechCrunch says Hugging Face would be Nvidia's second-largest acquisition, behind its $20 billion purchase of Groq's assets in December 2025. Requests for comment on whether Hugging Face had spoken with interim CEO Colette Kress were not returned.