NVIDIA's plan to buy Hugging Face just hit a regulatory speed bump. On October 28, Reuters reported that the U.S. Department of Justice is asking whether the chipmaker's roughly $12.9 billion acquisition of the open-source AI hub could harm competition — citing two people familiar with the matter.
The deal isn't blocked. But the questions being asked tell you a lot about how Washington sees NVIDIA's growing power.
What the DOJ wants to know
Hugging Face is where the open AI world lives — a central repository where developers host, share, and test open-source models, code, and datasets. Antitrust officials want to know whether owning it would let NVIDIA "capture a fundamental distribution point for AI." They're also examining whether NVIDIA could use the platform as leverage in commercial negotiations, disadvantage rival chipmakers, or steer developers toward its own hardware and software.
NVIDIA announced the agreement on September 3, with CEO Jensen Huang promising the platform would stay open to third-party processors, frameworks, and cloud services. The transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2027 — which gives regulators plenty of time to dig in.
Part of a much bigger probe
The Hugging Face questions are one thread in a years-long investigation. The DOJ's broader review of NVIDIA — which began under the Biden administration and has continued under Trump — covers acquisitions, investments, sales practices, and whether the company pressured customers. Investigators have looked at the Run:ai and SchedMD acquisitions, a 2025 arrangement where NVIDIA licensed Groq's technology and hired its key engineers instead of buying the company outright, and claims that chip allocations were tied to purchases of networking gear.
France is running its own antitrust investigation into NVIDIA as well. The DOJ and NVIDIA both declined to comment; Hugging Face didn't respond to Reuters.
What happens next
Let's be clear about one thing: an antitrust inquiry is not evidence of wrongdoing. These reviews can end in information requests, negotiated remedies, litigation — or nothing at all. But the direction is unmistakable. Regulators on two continents are now asking the same question: when one company controls the chips, the software stack, and the hub where open models are shared, how much of AI's future does it get to shape?
For developers, the practical takeaway is simple. Hugging Face stays independent until at least mid-2027, and Huang's open-platform promise is now on the record. If the deal closes with conditions, expect them to be about keeping it that way.
Originally published on Rohan Tech Official.
