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DOJ is asking questions about Nvidia's Hugging Face deal

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According to Reuters' sources, the US Justice Department has asked how Nvidia's $12.93 billion acquisition of Hugging Face would affect competition in AI. The questions are part of a years-long investigation into Nvidia's business conduct.

By: Mikola Máté Patrik · · 2 min read

Seal of the United States Department of Justice on a navy background
Image: U.S. Department of Justice · Public domain (US gov) · US government work, public domain · Source

What the department is asking

Reuters reported on October 28, citing two people familiar with the matter, that the DOJ has been asking about Nvidia's purchase of Hugging Face (Reuters via The Economic Times). The central question is whether the deal would let Nvidia capture a fundamental distribution point for AI. Officials are also asking how Nvidia might use the platform to harm rivals and whether it could gain leverage through it, and they are asking about Hugging Face's competitors.

Nvidia has said the deal is expected to close in the first half of 2027 and that Hugging Face will keep supporting work with a range of chip, cloud and AI providers. The DOJ and Nvidia declined to comment, and Hugging Face did not respond. Reuters stresses that government investigations are not evidence of wrongdoing and do not necessarily lead to lawsuits.

The broader probe

The questions are part of a wider investigation into Nvidia's conduct that began under President Joe Biden and has continued under President Donald Trump. According to the sources, the DOJ has also examined several earlier deals:

  • the December 2025 acquisition of SchedMD, which raised concerns about access to its open-source software for running supercomputers;
  • the acquisition of Run:ai;
  • the 2025 deal to license technology from Groq and hire its engineers;
  • whether Nvidia offered larger AI chip allocations to customers who also bought its networking gear and Groq processors.

The Decoder notes that Nvidia faces scrutiny in Europe as well: France's competition authority is concerned about the industry's dependence on CUDA and Nvidia's stakes in cloud providers such as CoreWeave (The Decoder).

What it means for you

Hugging Face is the de facto hub for open models and datasets, and almost every open-weight release lands there. If regulators take the distribution-point question seriously, they could attach conditions to the deal, such as guarantees of neutral access, or delay its closing. If your pipelines depend on HF or you host models there, there's nothing to do yet, but watch what commitments Nvidia makes on the platform's neutrality.

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