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Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B

businessinsider.com

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Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B

#121

Post by lotsofpulp »

DrewADesign wrote: post #90
Gigachad wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m asking more to work out what is the basis of this valuation. Why would Nvidia spend $13B for what seems to be a services that gives things away for free.

Talking about profit is so passé in the new economic paradigm. The rules have changed— it’s about how much a company is worth. Get with the times. –Some guys in every bubble I’ve witnessed.

This gets mentioned a lot, but the most valuable companies, by orders of magnitude, have the most profit, by orders of magnitude.

Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B

#122

Post by calebkaiser »

Gigachad wrote: post #104
weird-eye-issue wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is like saying GitHub or Google just gives away everything for free

Not really. GitHub has a strong platform of paying customers and a solid product that’s hard to replicate. Google is obvious. Hugging Face is a file download mirror with a couple of side features dangling off.

They hit 150 million in annual recurring revenue this year.

Pretty nice dangling side features apparently.

Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B

#123

Post by zx8080 »

Gigachad wrote: post #64
andy99 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn’t we just witness it? Become a critical ecosystem player then get acquired based on the value of that position.

I’m asking more to work out what is the basis of this valuation. Why would Nvidia spend $13B for what seems to be a services that gives things away for free.

> Why would Nvidia spend $13B for what seems to be a services that gives things away for free.

To stop that! Literally. To stop those services being free.

Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B

#124

Post by Gigachad »

calebkaiser wrote: post #122
Gigachad wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. GitHub has a strong platform of paying customers and a solid product that’s hard to replicate. Google is obvious. Hugging Face is a file download mirror with a couple of side features dangling off.

They hit 150 million in annual recurring revenue this year. Pretty nice dangling side features apparently.

That still leaves the company valued at 86 years of revenue

Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B

#125

Post by 392 »

GeertB wrote: post #108

Nvidia's been pretty terrible for open source / free software. No need to quote Linus Torvalds here. They want to control what runs on their hardware. They want to you write code against their proprietary drivers and APIs, not directly against the hardware (which these days of course also contains plenty of software, but still). Don't expect things to go differently this time around. Nvidia wants control over the sof…

I think it's a plausible play that keeps the AI boom in session for a year or two longer.

Or at least, $13b to stay at the head of the race (or keep the race running) must be worth it to someone's desk.

There's only $50b in datacenter buildout nationally (Source: Gemini, 2026).

So it is a bit of a puzzling choice for what amounts to a pile of software, in my opinion. but I don't know shit.

Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B

#126

Post by rvz »

etempleton wrote: post #117

I am just curious, and I genuinely want to know, how is a 150 million a year in revenue company worth 13 billion dollars?

Same reason why GitHub was acquired for $7.5B at $250 million ARR which is 30x revenues:

VCs could not see any other reason to raise more money and Huggingface was not growing as fast as they thought to justify the valuation or the next fundraise.

So they might as well get Nvidia to save them from the VCs pressurizing them.

Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B

#128

Post by typ »

root_axis wrote: post #105
manlymuppet wrote: post #27

Potentially horrible for monopoly reasons, but if other big acquisitions in the AI era teach us anything, developers are about to get a whole lot of free and discounted trial credits. That’s at least a plus. I will happily burn through as much VC money as they will give me to tinker with my projects.

True, but better nvidia than any other big tech contender. Nvidia has a very strong business incentive to make huggingface thrive, whereas pretty much everyone else has the opposite incentive.

Especially when all major labs are building their custom inference chips.

Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B

#129

Post by tiahura »

smelendez wrote: post #107
abixb wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lina Khan @ the FTC was the best thing about the Biden administration, for me.

I think failing to take advantage of the charisma of both Lina Khan and Janet Yellen, and not making them public-facing economics gurus like Alan Greenspan or Larry Summers historically were, was a huge tactical mistake by Biden.

Yellen was objectively the dumbest Treasury Secretary ever. When everyone and their dog realized inflation was getting out of control, she thought it was transitory. She literally gets an F- as an economist.

And some former Roomba employees may have thoughts about Kahn.

Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B

#130

Post by unsungNovelty »

bulbar wrote: post #112
petterroea wrote: post #28

I have never seen an acquisition be good for the users. I struggle to believe this one will be different

Acquisition of GitHub let to increased downtimes, but also to unlimited private repos for the free tier.

... Which gitlab already had before github. And still does.
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