The U.S. Department of Justice is reportedly taking a close look at Nvidia Corp. (NVDA) and its planned $12.93 billion purchase of Hugging Face. Think of it as antitrust regulators asking a very simple question: when one company makes the chips and also owns the place where everyone shares the AI models, who exactly is left to compete with?
The inquiry, per Reuters, covers Nvidia's acquisitions, investments and sales practices, including whether the company pressured customers. Officials are also examining whether the Hugging Face deal could give Nvidia control over a fundamental AI distribution point, and whether it could let the company disadvantage competing firms.
Hugging Face, for the uninitiated, is the hub where developers and researchers swap open-source AI models the way people trade recipes. Owning it is not like owning a factory. It is more like owning the town square. And the DOJ wants to know what happens to the town square when the biggest chipmaker in the world runs it.
The department has also reviewed Nvidia's December 2025 acquisition of SchedMD, whose open-source software supports supercomputers used in areas relevant to national security, the report added.
Nvidia, Hugging Face and DOJ did not immediately respond to MarketDash's request for comments.
The Deal That Would Rank Near The Top
Nvidia announced the Hugging Face purchase in August as a major expansion into open-source AI models. At $12.9 billion, it would rank among the company's largest acquisitions, behind its reported $20 billion deal for Groq.
Nvidia has said the transaction is expected to close during the first half of 2027. Hugging Face would continue working with multiple chipmakers, cloud providers and AI companies after the deal, according to the company.
That promise is the usual playbook: we will own it, but we will play nice with everyone. Regulators, unsurprisingly, tend to want more than a pinky swear.
Washington Was Already Circling
The DOJ review is not happening in a vacuum. In June, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) invited CEO Jensen Huang to testify before the Senate Banking Committee about the company's U.S. export-control position and business activities in China. Warren said China's purchases of American goods benefit U.S. companies financially but undermine the country's long-term national security.
So Nvidia is now juggling two conversations in Washington at once: one about what it sells abroad, and one about what it buys at home.
Price Action: Year-to-date, Nvidia's stock has surged 15.49%, according to market data. The shares dipped 0.70% to $213.88 premarket on Thursday.
