Reuters reports DOJ inquiry into Nvidia’s proposed Hugging Face deal

Reuters reported on October 28, 2026, that the U.S. Department of Justice had recently made inquiries about whether Nvidia’s proposed acquisition of Hugging Face could affect competition in AI. The reported questions include whether the deal could give Nvidia control or leverage over a major AI distribution point, harm rivals, and affect Hugging Face competitors.

Why Hugging Face’s role matters

Hugging Face is a platform for hosting, evaluating, customizing, and deploying AI models. The reported inquiry asks whether ownership of a platform at that point in the AI ecosystem could give Nvidia leverage over rivals or the route developers use to find and deploy models.

Nvidia’s September 3, 2026, announcement described Hugging Face as having more than 18 million developers, researchers, and creators, more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets, 1 million applications, and more than 200,000 companies. Those are figures reported by Nvidia. (Nvidia’s announcement)

What Nvidia says about developer choice

In announcing the agreement, Nvidia said developers would be able to choose their models, frameworks, clouds, inference providers, and computing platforms. It also said Nvidia computing would not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face, and that the platform would continue supporting open-source and open-weight models, multiple clouds, and multiple accelerators. These are Nvidia’s public commitments. (Nvidia’s announcement)

The proposed deal and its expected timing

Nvidia announced an agreement to acquire Hugging Face for $12,930,300,000 on September 3, 2026. NeoTeo covered the announcement in its earlier report on the proposed acquisition. Reuters attributed to Nvidia an expected closing window in the first half of 2027.

Reuters also reported broader scrutiny of Nvidia’s acquisitions, investments, sales practices, and customer relationships. The reported examination included Nvidia’s acquisitions of SchedMD and Run:ai, as well as its 2025 technology-licensing and hiring arrangement with Groq. Officials reportedly asked whether chip allocations were linked to customers buying Nvidia networking equipment and Groq processors.