The U.S. Department of Justice is questioning Nvidia's planned $12.93 billion acquisition of Hugging Face, Reuters reported Wednesday, asking whether the deal would let Nvidia capture a basic distribution point for AI models. The inquiry sits inside a broader, bipartisan review of Nvidia's acquisitions, investments and sales practices that predates the Trump administration.
San Francisco, Oct. 28 — Nvidia is fielding Department of Justice questions about its $12.93 billion agreement to buy Hugging Face, the open-model platform where developers host weights, datasets and collaboration tools, according to a Reuters report published Wednesday. CNBC confirmed the inquiry with a person familiar with the matter.
Officials want to know whether the transaction would let Nvidia capture a fundamental distribution point for AI, two people familiar with the questioning told Reuters — not merely add another portfolio company. Nvidia announced the deal in September and has said it expects closing in the first half of 2027, with Hugging Face continuing to work with multiple chip, cloud and model vendors. Nvidia declined to comment to Reuters; Hugging Face did not respond.
A Probe That Outlasted the White House
The Hugging Face questions arrive inside a years-long Justice Department examination of Nvidia that began under President Joe Biden and has continued under Donald Trump, Reuters reported. That broader review covers acquisitions, strategic investments, sales practices and whether Nvidia has pressured customers, the people said. Government investigations are not findings of wrongdoing and do not always produce lawsuits.
A DOJ spokesperson declined to comment on any matter before the department, citing longstanding policy, and added that the department under Trump would continue to prioritize advancement of superintelligence for the benefit of Americans. Reuters said there was no indication Trump is personally involved in the Nvidia work.
At announcement, Nvidia cited Hugging Face scale: more than 18 million users, 200,000 organizations, 3 million models and 500,000 datasets on the hub. For antitrust staff, the relevant comparison is structural — a neutral repository versus a platform node owned by the dominant AI accelerator supplier. Microsoft’s GitHub purchase in 2018 is the nearest precedent in software distribution, though Hugging Face sits closer to the model layer that feeds inference demand for Nvidia’s CUDA moat.
Other Deals on the Same Docket
Reuters reported that investigators have also scrutinized Nvidia’s December 2025 purchase of SchedMD, whose open-source workload manager runs large clusters tied to national-security computing; Nvidia has pledged continued open access. The department has examined the Groq licensing arrangement and engineer hires — Nvidia’s largest disclosed outlay before Hugging Face — including whether Nvidia tied larger GPU allocations to purchases of networking gear or Groq capacity, the people said. Officials have looked at the Run:ai acquisition as well, Reuters reported.
Together, the docket sketches a rollup strategy: silicon, scheduling software, inference pathways and now the public square where models are tested and shared. If STATE action delayed or conditioned the Hugging Face closing, Nvidia would still sell GPUs — but it would lose direct control over the catalog that shapes which architectures developers treat as default. Rivals Advanced Micro Devices, Broadcom and Google already pitch custom silicon and software stacks against Nvidia hardware; a gated hub would intensify that fight.
What Would Change the Read
Formal clearance without remedies would signal enforcers accept firewalls between Nvidia chip sales and Hugging Face neutrality. A second-request escalation, suit or forced divestiture would mark the first major U.S. check on Nvidia’s acqui-hire and licensing playbook since the AI boom accelerated. Public filing of customer-allocation theories — if any — would move the story from confidential questioning to market-visible risk.
For now, the binding force is regulatory attention at the moment Nvidia’s market value and political visibility are both at peaks. Hugging Face was marketed as widening access; Justice Department staff are asking whether ownership would instead narrow who gets heard on the platform everyone already uses.
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Sources
Reuters (Oct. 28, 2026), CNBC confirmation, Nvidia September 2026 acquisition announcement, prior DOJ reporting on Nvidia conduct
