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Why Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue Turned Down Half a Billion Dollars From Nvidia

While the model builders torch billions chasing frontier capabilities, Clément Delangue hasn’t raised a round in nearly three years—and turned down a $500 million check from Nvidia. The Hugging Face co-founder makes his case for open source, against the bubble and for being in no particular hurry.

There is a particular kind of confidence that comes from being able to say no to Nvidia. Late last year, the chipmaker—whose market capitalization now exceeds the GDP of most nations—offered Hugging Face a $500 million investment at a $7 billion valuation, a sum larger than everything the company had raised since its founding in 2016. Hugging Face passed. The official line, as reported by the Financial Times, was that the company did not want a single dominant investor in a position to sway its decisions. The unofficial line, audible in every unhurried sentence Clément Delangue offers, is that they simply did not need the money.

"We've taken a bit of an unconventional approach," Hugging Face co-founder and CEO Delangue tells Observer. While the model builders torch billions chasing frontier capabilities, Hugging Face—a platform where thousands of A.I. companies keeps its work—has not raised capital in nearly three years. It is funding its growth through revenue. The company was last valued at $4.5 billion in a $235 million Series D in 2023 led by Salesforce, with Google, Amazon and, yes, Nvidia among the backers that Delangue was content to keep at arm's length.

Ask Delangue whether we are in an A.I. bubble, and he will decline the binary. "If there is a bubble," he says, it's concentrated on large language models—the corner of the industry that has........

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