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Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf are each worth about $1.8 billion after Nvidia agreed to buy their company for $12.93 billion, according to Bloomberg.
The three French founders started Hugging Face in New York in 2016 and their first product was a chatbot aimed at teenagers, named after the emoji. It went nowhere in particular. What mattered was the tooling they built underneath it.
When Google published its open-source language model BERT in late 2018, Wolf's team rebuilt it in PyTorch and posted the code publicly within days. The response dwarfed anything the chatbot had produced, and the company pivoted into the infrastructure business it now dominates.
Hugging Face became the default place to host and distribute open-weight AI models, effectively GitHub for machine learning. More than 18 million developers, researchers and creators use it to share over 3 million models, 500,000 datasets and 1 million applications, and more than 200,000 companies use it to find, test, customise and deploy AI.
Nvidia will pay roughly $11.9 billion to shareholders and set aside up to $1 billion in equity retention awards for Hugging Face employees who join, according to its filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. It is the largest acquisition Nvidia has made, ahead of the roughly $7 billion it paid for Mellanox in 2020.
The valuation has moved fast. Hugging Face was worth $4.5 billion in a 2023 round that Nvidia itself participated in, alongside Intel, Advanced Micro Devices and Amazon.
Nvidia had also tried to buy in and been refused. It proposed a $500 million investment at around a $7 billion valuation less than a year ago, and the founders turned it down because they did not want a single chipmaker holding outsized influence over a platform meant to remain neutral.
Delangue says the approach came from his side this time. He told CNBC his company went to Jensen Huang a few weeks ago, having concluded over the summer that Hugging Face and open-source AI had reached a turning point and needed more resources, scale and visibility.
Huang said the two companies would scale the platform, strengthen its infrastructure and expand access to AI for developers and institutions, and that Hugging Face will remain open to the entire AI ecosystem, with Nvidia compute not required to build or deploy through it.
The strategic logic is about where Nvidia's advantage sits. The company has committed $18 billion to equity investments through this financial year, in what CNBC has described as a shift of its moat from chips to capital. Owning the distribution layer for open models hedges against any slowdown in demand for the hardware.
What the founders actually take home is not public. Neither company has disclosed their equity, and the market data platform Dealroom estimates the three hold about 28% between them, which at the acquisition price would give each roughly $1.2 billion rather than $1.8 billion. All three still run the company.
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