Hugging Face Chief Pledges Open-Source Fight After Huang Exit

A $12.9 billion acquisition now hangs on a leadership vacuum, and the acquired company's CEO wants everyone to know the mission survives. Hugging Face chief Clément Delangue on Thursday called Jensen Huang's departure from Nvidia "a really sad day" and vowed his platform will keep pushing open-source AI "harder than ever." The deal itself, announced in September, is still scheduled to close in the first half of 2027.

Delangue did not mince words on X. "This whole thing sucks, and I wish none of it had happened. It's a really sad day! But I want to make one thing clear: we'll keep fighting for open-source AI, harder than ever. This is too important to slow down now. Let's go!," he wrote. The exclamation marks are his, not ours.

Why does Huang's exit worry open-source advocates?

As Nvidia's CEO, Huang championed open-source and open-weight models with unusual consistency for a chip vendor. His departure raises a practical question: how will Nvidia, now led on an interim basis by Collette Kress, treat a company that controls a major distribution channel for AI models. Delangue's post reads as reassurance aimed squarely at that anxiety.

Regulators share some of that anxiety. Reuters reported in October that the U.S. Department of Justice has already made inquiries into how the acquisition would affect competition in the AI market. Nvidia has pledged the platform will preserve open support. Requests for comment on the deal's status, and on whether Hugging Face has spoken with Kress, went unanswered.

Huang's open-source record extends well beyond the Hugging Face purchase:

• July: his first-ever X post was an AI policy letter, signed by 25 companies including Microsoft, Meta, Hugging Face, IBM and Palantir, urging the U.S. government not to over-restrict open-weight models. The letter called models "anyone can download, inspect, modify, and run on their own infrastructure" a vital part of the AI ecosystem, making it "more accessible, adaptable, and widely available."
• August: Nvidia struck a $6 billion deal with coding startup Poolside to build out a U.S. open AI ecosystem, The Wall Street Journal reported — a hedge against Chinese rivals such as DeepSeek and Kimi K3.
• Last month: Nvidia expanded its Nemotron family with a 120-billion-parameter open-weight model for enterprise agents, plus two lightweight Bolt models that run on PCs.
• January: at CES in Las Vegas, Huang told his keynote audience that open-source models have "really revolutionized artificial intelligence."

In the July letter, Huang argued open-weight models expand access to the AI economy, strengthen competition and spare customers lock-in to a single provider. "Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty," he wrote.

What does this change for the deal?

In scale terms, the Hugging Face purchase ranks second in Nvidia's history. Only the December 2025 acquisition of chipmaker Groq's assets, at $20 billion, was larger. Huang was the reason many in the open-source community tolerated the optics of a GPU giant buying the movement's central repository. Kress, or whoever holds the seat permanently, inherits that goodwill along with the antitrust scrutiny.

For enterprises betting on open-weight deployments, the near-term picture is unchanged: the deal closes no earlier than 2027, and Delangue says the fight continues. Whether Nvidia's next chief signs the same policy letters is the question nobody at either company would answer on Thursday.