KEY POINTS
- Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue called Jensen Huang's departure from Nvidia a "really sad day" and promised to keep fighting for open-source AI.
- Nvidia's $12.9 billion deal to acquire Hugging Face is still expected to close in the first half of 2027.
- Huang was a prominent supporter of open-weight models, which raises questions about Nvidia's direction under interim CEO Collette Kress.
Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue said on Thursday that his company will keep working for open-source AI after the departure of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, TechCrunch reported. In a short post on X, Delangue called the moment a "really sad day."
Nvidia announced in September that it planned to acquire Hugging Face, the platform for open-source AI models, for $12.9 billion. According to TechCrunch, that makes it the second-largest purchase in Nvidia's history, behind its $20 billion deal for assets of chipmaker Groq in December 2025. The Hugging Face transaction is still expected to close in the first half of 2027.
Delangue wrote that he wished none of this had happened, but wanted to be clear that Hugging Face would fight for open-source AI "harder than ever." He added that the cause is too important to slow down. TechCrunch read the message as an effort to reassure open-source supporters who might worry about the change at the top of Nvidia.
Huang was widely known as a strong advocate of open-source AI and open-weight models, so some observers may question how Nvidia will approach the area without him. TechCrunch said its requests for comment on the status of the deal, and on whether Hugging Face has spoken with Nvidia's interim CEO Collette Kress, were not returned.
The acquisition was already drawing regulatory attention. Reuters reported in October that the U.S. Department of Justice had begun asking questions about how the deal would affect competition in the AI market. Nvidia has pledged that the platform would stay open, but the purchase would also give the company control over a major channel for distributing AI models.
Huang's support for open models went well beyond Hugging Face. In July he published an AI policy letter, his first-ever post on X, signed by 25 companies including Microsoft, Meta, Hugging Face, IBM and Palantir. It urged the U.S. government not to restrict open-weight models too heavily. Huang argued that such models widen access to the AI economy, strengthen competition and spare customers from being locked into one provider.
Nvidia has also made open-model bets of its own. The Wall Street Journal reported that in August the company announced a $6 billion deal with coding startup Poolside to help build an open AI ecosystem in the U.S. that can compete with Chinese players such as DeepSeek and Kimi K3. Last month Nvidia expanded its Nemotron open-weight family with a 120-billion-parameter model for enterprise agents and two lightweight Bolt models that run on PCs. Huang also praised open-source models in his January keynote at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
