The US Justice Department is asking whether Nvidia's planned $12.93 billion acquisition of Hugging Face could give the chipmaker control over a key hub for distributing AI and weaken its rivals. According to two sources cited by Reuters, that is the core question officials are now working through. Nvidia expects the deal to close in the first half of 2027, and the company says Hugging Face will keep supporting partnerships with a range of chip, cloud, and AI providers. Those assurances deserve to be tested rather than accepted at face value.
The concern is not abstract. Hugging Face is an open-source platform that many developers rely on to share and deploy AI models. If the platform's central role in that ecosystem ended up tied to the company that sells most of the hardware those models run on, the incentives would be hard to ignore. A promise to stay neutral is easy to make and hard to enforce once control has changed hands.
The Hugging Face review does not stand alone. According to the same reporting, US antitrust regulators are examining Nvidia's acquisitions, investments, and sales practices, a probe that began under Joe Biden and has continued under Donald Trump. Officials have looked at the SchedMD and Run:ai acquisitions and the Groq licensing deal. They are also checking whether Nvidia offered customers more AI chips if they also bought Nvidia networking gear and Groq processors. Taken together, the pattern is worth examining closely.
Europe is pressing the same questions. France's competition authority is investigating Nvidia over alleged anticompetitive practices, including concern about industry dependence on the CUDA programming software and about the company's stakes in cloud providers such as CoreWeave. The regulator has pointed to possible risks like supply restrictions, unfair contract terms, and discrimination against certain customers. When regulators on both sides of the Atlantic raise overlapping concerns, that is a signal that the issues go beyond a single transaction.
What should happen next is straightforward. Regulators should require clear, enforceable commitments on access and neutrality before any Hugging Face deal closes, and they should examine the bundling allegations on their own terms rather than treating them as a footnote. Nvidia has the right to defend its business, but the burden of showing that its dominance is not being used to squeeze rivals should rest with the company. Hugging Face's value depends on being open to everyone, and the review should protect that.