Nvidia under double scrutiny: questions over Hugging Face and a spy report involving Jensen Huang

The US Justice Department wants to know how Nvidia's planned acquisition of Hugging Face would affect competition in AI. Reuters reported this citing two people familiar with the matter, CNBC confirmed it with its own source, and Heise laid out the details. Nvidia announced the purchase of the platform, a central hub for sharing AI models and datasets, in September for 12.93 billion dollars and hopes to complete it in the first half of 2027. Investigators are examining whether Nvidia could use that distribution point to disadvantage rivals. According to Nvidia, more than 18 million people and 200,000 companies use the platform; the chipmaker promises it will remain open to competing chip, cloud and model providers.

Those questions run alongside a broader probe into Nvidia's practices that began under President Biden. According to Reuters, cited by Heise, the Justice Department is also looking at the 17 billion dollar licensing deal with chip start-up Groq from December 2025 and at the acquisitions of Run:ai and SchedMD. An investigation does not in itself mean anything went wrong.

At the same time, The New York Times published a report involving Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang. VRT NWS and CNBC summarised it: US intelligence agencies monitored Alice Huang, a Chinese citizen and executive at Singapore data centre company Megaspeed, whom they suspect of spying for Beijing. She allegedly had close contact for a year with the Nvidia chief, who is not himself accused of anything. According to Engadget he received no warning from the government. According to the newspaper, President Trump was aware but did not intervene. Nvidia describes the contacts as ordinary customer meetings and told CNBC that allegations of chip diversion had already been investigated and refuted. China calls it unfounded speculation.