According to an exclusive Reuters report on 28 October, the US Justice Department is asking questions about Nvidia's agreement to buy Hugging Face for about $12.9 billion. The inquiries focus on whether the deal could harm competition or give Nvidia control of a key distribution channel for models and datasets. The review is part of a broader, years-long examination of Nvidia's acquisitions and sales practices. The deal is expected to close in the first half of 2027.

What it means: Hugging Face is to open AI what GitHub is to code: the place where hundreds of thousands of models and datasets are published, downloaded and compared. The prospect of it passing to the largest maker of AI processors raises reasonable questions: will it stay neutral towards rival chips, will Nvidia's tools be favoured, will the terms of use change? The authorities' questions do not mean the deal will be blocked, but they show it will be examined seriously. A review by the European Commission is also quite likely, given Hugging Face's strong presence in France. For Greek teams that rely on the platform to download open models or host their own, nothing changes for now. It is, however, a good moment to keep local copies of the models and data they use in production and to record their licences, so that a future policy change does not catch them unprepared. The case also shows that competition authorities now treat open AI infrastructure as critical.

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