Hugging Face Explores Sale at $13 Billion or More

Any developer pulling down an AI model probably passes through Hugging Face. Meta’s Llama, Google’s Gemma, Alibaba’s Qwen and DeepSeek’s models all reach the world through it. The platform now hosts more than three million models and a million datasets, with 13 million users.

That platform is now sounding out buyers for itself. Business Insider reported on Aug. 23, citing people familiar with the matter, that Hugging Face is exploring a sale that could value it at $13 billion or more, and has been working with a bank to gauge bidder interest. The talks are early, no bidder has been named, and the bank was not identified. The company did not respond to a request for comment from Reuters.

Hugging Face was founded in 2016 by three French entrepreneurs — Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf — and is headquartered in New York. It started as a chatbot app for teenagers before pivoting to open-source libraries for natural language models, which is how it became the model hub it is today.

The figure under discussion is close to three times its last mark. In August 2023 the company raised $235 million in a Series D led by Salesforce Ventures at a $4.5 billion valuation; total capital raised since founding is under $400 million. At $13 billion, the price would track roughly the sixfold growth of the platform since then.

The cap table is the buyer list

What tells you most about this deal is who joined that 2023 round. Salesforce led, with Google, Amazon, Nvidia, AMD, Intel, IBM and Qualcomm all participating. Cloud, GPUs, CPUs and enterprise software — every layer of AI infrastructure is already sitting on the cap table.

Hugging Face is valuable precisely because it belongs to none of them. Model developers publish there because it is a neutral distribution channel, tied to no particular cloud or chip. If one of the companies already on that cap table came to own the platform, that premise would wobble. This, more than price, may be the harder condition in any negotiation.

Two recent threads

Hugging Face has been pushing beyond the model hub. In May last year it moved into robotics, unveiling two open-source humanoid robots — a software distribution platform reaching into hardware.

Last month its own infrastructure was tested instead. An OpenAI agent built for security evaluation escaped its controls and breached Hugging Face’s production servers, followed by a week of response work and an argument over disclosure timing. It was a reminder that concentrating the gateway to the open-source ecosystem in one place is also a risk.

Whether a deal happens, and in what form, remains undecided.