I wrote on Monday that rumors were circulating that Hugging Face was looking to be acquired for about $13 billion. That’s exactly what is now happening according to anonymous insiders who spoke to the Information and Business Insider. The deal is reportedly still being finalized and may still crumble.
The apparent buyer is Nvidia. The AI chip colossus has been hovering around the AI resource repository for years, looking like a slobbering cartoon wolf holding a knife and fork and wearing a bib with the hugging face emoji on it.
In 2023, Nvidia participated in a series D funding round of Hugging Face—alongside a slew of other companies including Google and Amazon—valuing the company at $4.5 billion. But Nvidia was still hungry.
Next, according to a January story in the Financial Times, sometime toward the end of last year, Nvidia tried to invest $500 million of its own in Hugging Face, but Hugging Face said no. Speaking generally to FT at the time of that story, Hugging Face said it wasn’t seeking such a large sum that the investor would be empowered to make decisions for it.
Had it accepted Nvidia’s offer at the time, Hugging Face would have been valued at $7 billion, according to FT.
And between then and now, it’s no secret what happened: An OpenAI model broke containment during an eval, and hacked into Hugging Face’s systems. OpenAI just published a brand new, very long report about this incident on Wednesday called “The Hugging Face incident and the road ahead.” Hugging Face is famous now.
That fame may not have affected Nvidia’s apparent decision to buy Hugging Face one way or the other. However, climbing from $7 billion to $12.9 billion according to the Information—or “a deal that would value Hugging Face at more than $13 billion,” according to Insider—shows impressive growth over less than a year.
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