NVIDIA advanced 0.6% in pre-market trading on Thursday after the company confirmed it would acquire Hugging Face, the leading open-source artificial intelligence platform, for $12.93 billion. The deal, including a $1 billion employee retention package, values the transaction at approximately $14 billion.
Hugging Face’s platform is used by more than 18 million developers across over 200,000 organizations, and hosts millions of open AI models and datasets. The acquisition underscores NVIDIA’s strategy to expand its AI ecosystem amid intensifying competition in the semiconductor sector.
NVIDIA closed at $224.41 on September 1, up $6.97, or 3.21%, while after-hours trading showed a further gain of $1.24, or 0.55%, to $225.65. The move follows strong sector performance, with Broadcom reporting fiscal third-quarter 2026 revenue of $29.59 billion, exceeding expectations, and AI semiconductor revenue surging 221% year-over-year to $16.7 billion.
Analysts have revised upward their outlooks for NVIDIA. JPMorgan maintained an above-average rating and set a price target of $320. Pierre Ferragu of New Street Research suggested a share price above $400 within the next 18 months is "very probable."
The broader market showed modest gains, with the S&P 500 up 0.3% and the Dow Jones rising 0.6%, though technology gains were tempered by rising Federal Reserve interest rate expectations and ongoing discussions about potential semiconductor tariffs.
