By Ron Patel
Publication Date: 2026-11-02 00:55:00
Nvidia can’t seem to close a deal lately without the Justice Department showing up right behind it. This time the target is the open-source hub that half the AI world runs on.
Reuters reported on October 28, 2026 that the Justice Department is asking how Nvidia’s proposed purchase of Hugging Face would affect competition in AI. Antitrust staff want to know whether owning Hugging Face would hand Nvidia control of a key distribution point for AI models, and whether the company could use that position to box out rival chipmakers. Nvidia announced the acquisition on September 3, 2026. It says the deal is still on track to close in the first half of 2027.
Hugging Face is not a product most consumers have heard of, but inside AI development it functions like GitHub for machine learning. According to figures reported by outlets covering the deal, the platform serves roughly 18 million developers and 200,000 companies, hosting about 3 million models, 500,000 datasets and 1 million applications. Nvidia is already the platform’s single largest contributor of open models, having published more than 500 models and 250 open datasets there. Buying Hugging Face doesn’t just add a product line: it puts Nvidia in charge of the shelf that other people’s AI models sit on.
That’s exactly what has antitrust officials uneasy.
A chipmaker owning the hub where rival hardware makers’ customers go to find and deploy models is a different kind of power than owning a bigger GPU. Nvidia’s…
