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Jensen Huang's Nvidia has agreed to buy open-source AI hub Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, The Information reported, citing a single unnamed source. Neither company has confirmed the deal, and CNBC said it could not independently verify the report.
It was reported separately that talks remained unsigned as of Wednesday night and could still collapse, and that Microsoft had ended competing acquisition talks with Hugging Face.
If completed, the deal would rank among Nvidia's largest and would hand the roughly $5 trillion chipmaker control of the main distribution point for open-source AI models at the precise moment its biggest customers are building alternatives to its hardware. OpenAI, Google, Amazon and Anthropic are all developing in-house silicon. Owning the repository developers actually use is Huang's hedge against being designed out.
"It is clear that Nvidia wants to be integrated in the entire stack vertically, going from energy to foundational models and also to applications," said Siddy Jobe, a fund manager at Eonopolis Exponential Technologies.
The reported price is nearly triple the $4.5 billion valuation Hugging Face carried in its 2023 round, backed by Salesforce Ventures, GV and IBM Ventures. It is far above the $7 billion valuation implied by a $500 million Nvidia investment offer that Hugging Face rejected, according to the Financial Times.
Against annualised revenue of roughly $150 million, reported by The Information, $12.9 billion works out to about 86 times sales. Huang is not buying earnings — he is buying the developer layer.
Founded in New York in 2016, Hugging Face runs a GitHub-like repository where developers share, download and run open-source models and datasets.
The report surfaced hours after Nvidia's quarterly results. The company beat on both lines adjusted earnings of $2.22 a share on revenue of $96.2 billion against consensus of $2.09 and $92.3 billion and guided to about $108 billion for the current quarter. Data centre revenue rose 18 percent sequentially to $89 billion.
NVDA closed at $209.66 on Wednesday, down 1.59 percent, then rose 4.71 percent to about $219.53 after hours on the earnings beat. Shares extended gains in Thursday pre-market trading. The after-hours move followed the results, not the Hugging Face report, which surfaced later that evening.
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