Clément Delangue, CEO of Hugging Face, offered a brief comment on Thursday regarding the departure of NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, describing it as a “very sad day.” Last September, NVIDIA announced plans to acquire the open-source AI model platform for $12.9 billion—a deal that would have marked the second-largest acquisition in the company’s history, trailing only the $20 billion purchase of chipmaker Groq’s assets in December 2025.
“The whole thing is terrible; I truly wish it hadn’t happened. A very sad day indeed! But I want to be clear: we will continue to fight for open-source AI harder than ever before. This is too important—we cannot afford to slow down now. Let’s keep going!” Delangue wrote on X.
This article is quite interesting, as it suggests that Huang’s departure might cause concern among open-source advocates—a concern he has sought to address by offering reassurance.
As CEO of Nvidia, Jensen Huang has been a vocal proponent of open-source AI and open-weight models; consequently, there may be apprehension regarding how Nvidia will approach this area once he steps down.
According to a Reuters report from October, the U.S. Department of Justice launched an investigation into how Nvidia’s planned acquisition of Hugging Face might affect competition within the AI market. Although Nvidia has pledged that the platform will remain open, the acquisition would effectively place a key distribution channel for AI models under the company’s control.
The acquisition of Hugging Face is still slated to close in the first half of 2027. Requests for further comment—regarding the status of the deal and whether Hugging Face has engaged with Nvidia’s interim CEO, Colette Kress—have yet to receive a response.
Jensen Huang’s advocacy for open source and open-source AI is long-standing and extends well beyond Hugging Face. This past July, the CEO shared his first-ever post on the social network X: an open letter on AI policy. Co-signed by 25 companies—including Microsoft, Meta, Hugging Face, IBM, and Palantir—the letter urged the U.S. government to avoid placing excessive restrictions on open-source AI models. It argued that models which can be downloaded, inspected, modified, and run on one’s own infrastructure are a vital component of the AI ecosystem, as they make AI “more accessible, adaptable, and widely available.”
Huang further noted that open-weight models broaden access to the AI economy, foster competition, and grant customers greater control by ensuring they are not locked into a single vendor. “Open models enhance safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and adoption, and enable autonomy,” he wrote in his post on X.
As reported by The Wall Street Journal at the time, Nvidia also announced a $6 billion deal in August with the programming startup Poolside, aimed at helping the U.S. build an open artificial intelligence ecosystem to counter Chinese players such as DeepSeek and Kimi K3. Last month, Nvidia expanded its Nemotron family of open-weight models by introducing a large, 120-billion-parameter agentic model for enterprise users, alongside two new, lightweight “Bolt” models designed to run on PCs.
Earlier this year, during a keynote address at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Jensen Huang championed open-source AI, noting that open-source models have “truly revolutionized artificial intelligence.”