The US Department of Justice is making inquiries about Nvidia's agreement to acquire Hugging Face for roughly $13 billion, Reuters reported on 28 October — and the question being asked is the one that matters: whether the deal would give Nvidia control of a key distribution point for artificial intelligence.
Nvidia announced the purchase in September and sold it as a defence of the open-source ecosystem. Hugging Face is where developers publish and download model weights, datasets and libraries, and Nvidia promised to keep the platform open. But a hub that decides what gets surfaced, cached and optimised for Nvidia hardware is also a chokepoint, and that is the framing antitrust lawyers appear to be testing.
According to Reuters, the inquiries have been folded into a probe the department has been running for years into Nvidia's conduct. Bloomberg reported last month that investigators were also examining whether Nvidia structured a $20 billion licensing agreement with chip startup Groq to escape antitrust review: Groq stayed independent, but its chief executive and operating chief moved to Nvidia, and some US lawmakers described the arrangement as a takeover in disguise.
Nvidia declined to comment, and Hugging Face did not immediately respond. The Justice Department, which by longstanding policy does not discuss open matters, issued a statement instead: 'We can affirm that this DOJ under President Trump's leadership will continue to prioritize advancement of Super Intelligence for the betterment of the American people.'
The stakes run past a single transaction. Nvidia is the world's most valuable company, and it has spent years converting dominance in AI accelerators into positions in networking, software, models and cloud. It is also reported to be in talks with Reflection AI, an open-weight model startup it already backs.
For developers, the practical question is what 'open' means when the largest vendor owns the shelf. Nvidia has promised to keep Hugging Face independent in spirit; a consent agreement with the Justice Department could turn that promise into something enforceable, with conditions on pricing, access and hardware optimisation.
What to watch: whether the inquiries become a formal second request, which would push any closing into 2027; whether Nvidia offers behavioural commitments on access rather than fighting; and whether the European Commission and the UK's CMA open parallel reviews, as they have with earlier Nvidia transactions.
