Nvidia's $12.9B Hugging Face buy: open source, now owned

$12.9 billion for a company doing roughly $150M in annual revenue — about 86x revenue, and Nvidia has reportedly agreed to it. The Information broke the story on 26 Aug; Bloomberg, Reuters and Business Insider have since matched pieces of it. Worth flagging: the deal is not signed, neither company has confirmed anything publicly, and reporting says it could still fall apart.

The price is close to 3x Hugging Face's $4.5B Series D valuation from 2023 — and the company reportedly turned down a $500M investment at $7B in late 2025. Revenue climbed from ~$100M to ~$150M in two months, with CEO Clem Delangue saying it's near profitability.

Why Nvidia wants it: the open-weight ecosystem is Nvidia's moat. Every developer pulling a model off the Hub is a developer not locked into a rival's proprietary stack and custom silicon. Hugging Face also already rents compute, which hands Nvidia a cloud re-entry without building one — plus somewhere to route unused capacity from customer commitments.

The tension writes itself: the neutral, vendor-agnostic model registry of record would be owned by the company selling the GPUs everyone runs those models on.

Why it matters: whoever owns the default place developers get their models gets to define what "open" means.