Hugging Face chief vows to keep fighting for open AI after Huang’s departure

Hugging Face CEO Clément Delang called Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s departure “a very sad day” and said the company would continue to champion open AI. Nvidia announced plans to buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion in September. The deal would be the second-largest in Nvidia’s history, after its $20 billion acquisition of chipmaker Groq’s assets in December 2025. It is still expected to close in the first half of 2027.

Delang vows to keep fighting for open AI after Huang’s departure

Delang wrote on X that he was sorry about what had happened, but that Hugging Face would advocate for open AI even more actively. His post came as Huang was leaving: Nvidia backed open models under his leadership, and supporters of that approach may be concerned about how the company will act without him at the helm.

What’s at stake

After the acquisition was announced, the US Department of Justice began examining how the deal would affect competition in the AI market, Reuters reported in October. Nvidia had promised to maintain open support for the platform, but would also gain control of a major channel for distributing AI models.

TechCrunch did not receive a response to its questions about the deal’s status or whether the Hugging Face team had already spoken with Nvidia’s interim CEO, Colette Kress.

Huang’s support for open models extended beyond Hugging Face. In July, he published his first post on X: a letter on AI policy signed by 25 companies. They included Microsoft, Meta, Hugging Face, IBM and Palantir. The signatories urged the US government not to impose excessive restrictions on open-weight models.

The letter said that such models — which anyone can download, study, modify and run on their own infrastructure — are important to the AI ecosystem: they make the technology more accessible, flexible and widely available. Huang also wrote that open models broaden access to the AI economy, strengthen competition and give customers more control by preventing them from becoming tied to a single provider. In his words, these models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and the spread of technology, and help achieve technological sovereignty.

Nvidia’s other initiatives

In August, Nvidia announced a $6 billion deal with Poolside, a startup developing coding tools. The partnership was intended to help build an open AI ecosystem in the US and strengthen the country’s position in competing with Chinese companies such as DeepSeek and Kimi K3, The Wall Street Journal reported at the time.

Last month, Nvidia expanded its family of open Nemotron models, introducing a 120-billion-parameter model for enterprise AI agents and two new lightweight Bolt models that run on personal computers.

In January, Huang delivered a keynote at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and voiced support for open models. He said they had already transformed artificial intelligence.

Dataist’s take: Huang’s departure raises the question of whether Nvidia will maintain its previous course on open models after the deal closes. The company has so far said it intends to keep Hugging Face’s support open, while the deal would also give it control of a major channel for distributing models.