Jensen Huang, co-founder, president and CEO of Nvidia, gestures during a press briefing in Paris on Oct. 13, 2026.<\/p>\n
Joel Saget | AFP | Getty Images<\/p>\n
Nvidia is facing questions from the U.S. Department of Justice concerning its acquisition of Hugging Face<\/a>, an open-source platform for hosting and testing AI models, and how that deal may impact competitors in the field.<\/p>\n CNBC has confirmed the probe with a person familiar with the matter, who asked not to be named because they were not authorized to speak publicly. Reuters first reported<\/a> the DOJ’s inquiry on Wednesday. <\/p>\n Nvidia<\/a> announced its nearly $13 billion acquisition of Hugging Face in September<\/a>, and at the time, CEO Jensen Huang wrote that the deal would help “expand access to AI for developers and institutions worldwide.”<\/p>\n Hugging Face already had massive adoption. At the time of the deal, Nvidia said in a press statement that more than 18 million people and more than 200,000 companies reportedly used Hugging Face to share at least 3 million models and 500,000 datasets.<\/p>\n Hugging Face also sells infrastructure and collaboration tools to organizations working with closed, proprietary AI including chip companies. <\/p>\n The Hugging Face acquisition marked Nvidia’s second-biggest purchase, after it paid $20 billion for Groq assets at the end of last year, a deal that has also attracted DOJ scrutiny<\/a>. The closest comparable to Hugging Face’s business was GitHub, a software repository that was acquired by Microsoft<\/a> in 2018 for $7.5 billion. <\/p>\n