creators

Clem Delangue — co-founder and CEO of Hugging Face

Clem Delangue co-founded Hugging Face in 2016 and runs it as CEO. Nvidia agreed in September 2026 to buy the open-model platform for about $12.9 billion.

Clément "Clem" Delangue grew up in La Bassée in northern France; as a teenager he and his brother sold imported bikes on eBay. He took ESCP Business School's Master in Management in 2012, turned down a job at Google and joined the Paris computer-vision startup Moodstocks, where he first worked with machine learning. In 2016 he co-founded Hugging Face in New York with Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf. The first product was an open-domain chatbot for teenagers; after the founders open-sourced the model underneath it, the company became the place people share machine-learning models and datasets. He has been CEO since. Nvidia's announcement counts 18 million developers on the platform, 3 million models, 500,000 datasets and a million applications, used by more than 200,000 companies. On 2 September 2026 Nvidia signed a definitive agreement to buy Hugging Face for about $12.9 billion — $11.9 billion to shareholders plus roughly $1 billion in retention equity. The deal is expected to close in the first half of 2027, subject to regulatory approval; Nvidia says the platform will stay open and multi-vendor. Delangue argues in public for open models over closed ones.

Specialization

open-source AI, machine learning platforms, developer community

Country

United States