The U.S. Department of Justice has asked Nvidia Corp. for information about how its $12.9 billion acquisition of Hugging Face Inc. could affect competitors in the AI industry, as antitrust enforcers continue to scrutinize the chipmaker's conduct1,2.
CNBC confirmed the probe with a person familiar with the matter, who asked not to be named because they were not authorized to speak publicly. Reuters first reported the DOJ's inquiry on October 28.
Nvidia announced the nearly $13 billion acquisition of Hugging Face in September. At the time, CEO Jensen Huang wrote that the deal would help expand access to AI for developers and institutions worldwide. Hugging Face runs a widely used, open-source platform for hosting and testing AI models and sells infrastructure and collaboration tools to the tech industry.
The Hugging Face deal marked Nvidia's second-biggest purchase, after it paid $20 billion for Groq assets at the end of last year.
ANALYSIS The DOJ inquiry targets a structural chokepoint: Hugging Face is the dominant open platform through which AI developers share models and datasets, and Nvidia's ownership of it could give the chipmaker leverage over how competitors access and distribute AI artifacts. The deal's scale, combined with the earlier Groq acquisition, puts two major pieces of AI infrastructure under one roof.
The DOJ has inquired specifically about the impact of the Hugging Face deal on AI competition. Antitrust enforcers are continuing to probe Nvidia's broader conduct alongside the acquisition review.