Hugging Face goes from a ‘scrappy’ startup named after an emoji to $13 billion Nvidia acquisition

Welcome to Eye on AI. Emily Forlini here, filling in for Beatrice Nolan. In today’s issue:

Nvidia will purchase open-source AI platform Hugging Face for $13B

OpenAI debuts GPT-6 Astra model

Google debuts Gemini 3.8 Flash model

ChatGPT experiences second outage in three days—and Claude, Grok also go down

Reporting on AI every single day has admittedly made me bit numb to the astronomical sums of money flowing into the industry, but today my eyes did a cartoonish pop when I saw how much Nvidia is buying Hugging Face for.

“Nvidia has agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12,930,300,000,” a blog post said. While it’s not the biggest sum we’ve seen in the AI industry, it’s quite the startup exit for Hugging Face. The company was founded in 2016 by three French entrepreneurs living in New York City, who named it after the 🤗 emoji. Over the next 10 years, it has grown into a trusted repository for AI developers.

“It’s been a wild ride for Hugging Face,” cofounder Thomas Wolf said on X. “We certainly did not anticipate, back in 2016, as a tiny team of scrappy underdogs, that the field would grow so much or that the impact we could have on it would become so massive.”

The deal also makes clear how important open-weight models, like the ones Hugging Face hosts on its platform, are for the future of Nvidia’s business. As OpenAI, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and other closed-source AI heavyweights that have been major customers of Nvidia develop their own chips to reduce reliance on Nvidia GPUs, the company sees open-weight models as a core future revenue stream.

For Hugging Face, getting bankrolled by Nvidia could mean major growth for the platform. It currently has 18 million individual users and 200,000 enterprise clients, Nvidia told reporters today. “Our goal is is to get to 100 million AI builders in the next few next few years, and we think with the support of of Nvidia, we have more chances to get there faster,” Hugging Face CEO and cofounder Clément Delangue said.

But while Nvidia and Hugging Face line their pockets, the individuals that created and listed models on Hugging Face haven’t seen a dollar.

“It’s unfortunate [Hugging Face] never found a way for us to monetize our creations,” Eric Hartford, creator of an open-weight model called Dolphin, Chief Scientist of lazarusaie.com, and the founder of quixi.ai tells Fortune. “If I got a dollar for every download of Dolphin I’d be rich.”

Hugging Face turned down Nvidia in the past. Why now?

Nvidia has had its eye on Hugging Face for years. It participated........

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