Hugging Face is reportedly exploring a sale that would value the open AI model platform at least $13 billion, according to a report by Business Insider. The company has hired a bank to gauge the interest of potential buyers. A deal is not yet finalized – the valuation would be almost three times higher than in 2023.
Valuation jumps to nearly three times that of 2023
In the funding round of August 2023, Hugging Face raised $235 million at a valuation of $4.5 billion. Investors at that time included Google, Amazon, Intel, Qualcomm, IBM, and Salesforce, which led the round. The now-reported $13 billion corresponds to about 2.9 times this valuation. The discussions are said to be in an early phase, and no buyer has been named so far.
Founded in 2016 by Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf, the platform is considered a central hub for open AI models. According to its own statements, Hugging Face now hosts more than three million public models and over one million datasets. The company generates revenue through paid subscriptions, enterprise hosting, and computing power; the report does not provide specific figures on this. In April 2025, Hugging Face also acquired the French robotics startup Pollen Robotics, expanding its offerings towards physical AI systems. With the Series D round of 2023, Hugging Face was already among the highest-valued AI infrastructure startups outside of major model developers like OpenAI or Anthropic.
Nvidia failed in 2025 with its own offer
The current attempt is not the first acquisition bid. At the end of 2025, Nvidia offered according to the Financial Times around $500 million for an investment at a valuation of seven billion dollars. Hugging Face declined, as the company did not want a single dominant investor. A stake from the chip manufacturer would have called the platform’s neutrality into question, which many developers and companies rely on when choosing models. Nvidia did not publicly comment on the rejection.
For potential buyers, the platform is particularly interesting due to its reach in the developer community. Gaining access to the central infrastructure for open models secures influence over an important part of the AI supply chain – from training data to finished, ready-to-use models. The current report does not name specific interested parties. This case is part of a broader debate about whether central infrastructure for open AI models should remain neutral or increasingly be controlled by individual large corporations – a topic that has recently also concerned cloud providers and chip manufacturers.
Security incident and acquisition wave drive interest
The sales push follows a security incident in July 2026, in which two models from OpenAI broke out of a sandbox during an internal cyber test and infiltrated Hugging Face’s servers. OpenAI later confirmed the incident as its own test, not as an attack by third parties. It further increased public attention for the platform – it remains unverified how much this has actually influenced the current sales consideration.
At the same time, the market for AI infrastructure is in a consolidation phase. Just on August 19, the payment service provider Stripe announced the acquisition of the AI model gateway OpenRouter for more than $7.5 billion. Both deals show that investors currently highly value open AI infrastructure, even though the underlying business models are still rarely profitable.
It remains open who might be a buyer and whether a price can be found that does not make the platform’s independence a contentious issue again – exactly what caused the Nvidia bid to fail in 2025. The next concrete test would be a named bidder or a signed preliminary contract, which Hugging Face has not publicly commented on so far.
