Live data from Hacker News

Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B

businessinsider.com

421–430 of 952 posts

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

#421

> Hugging Face turned down a $500 million investment offer from Nvidia late last year that would have valued it at $7 billion, the Financial Times previously reported. Hugging Face said at the time it did not want a dominant investor that could sway decisions. So instead they sold themselves to the same investor completely ?

I mean, it's $500M versus $13B.

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

#423
post #323

Forgive me for newb question, but why Hugging Face is a thing at all? Couldn't models be simply distributed via torrents? And the whole aggregator thing would come down to indexing magent links published by model providers?

Well, ask yourself: "Why am I on Hacker News?". You could just "as easy" use free / opensource alternatives like Lemmy, Mastodon, etc.

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

#424
post #154
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They’re buying a brand, some employees, and some momentum — not any of their software. HF probably does have propriety goodies to make it all run efficiently, but certainly not a billion dollars worth, much less 13!

No company is going to be acquired for their software alone with multi-billion valuations ever again. It should be clear by now that code alone is not where the value is anymore, if it ever was.

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

#425

I don't understand the CUDA lockin in 2026... Surely anyone can take any piece of CUDA code and tell some LLM to port it to another platform and keep grinding till performance is identical?

Sounds like that's what z.ai did to get GLM-5.3-Flash running on Huawei chips.

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

#426

> Hugging Face turned down a $500 million investment offer from Nvidia late last year that would have valued it at $7 billion, the Financial Times previously reported. Hugging Face said at the time it did not want a dominant investor that could sway decisions. So instead they sold themselves to the same investor completely ?

Money always wins, sadly.

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

#428
post #355
post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NVIDIA is one of the most open labs. They even share many of their pre-training and even post-training datasets for Nemotron on HuggingFace; for example: https://huggingface.co/datasets/nvidia/Nemotron-Post-Trainin... Which other lab shares this? Yes, there is no question NVIDIA wants to lock you into CUDA and their hardware. But also, they’ve consistently demonstrated the most openness when it comes to model trainin…

> NVIDIA is one of the most open labs. Nvidia’s history with linux shows the opposite. And as a user running models on a linux/AMD stack, this information does not fill me with hope.

"lab" vs "company as a whole"

They might be right w.r.t. openness about LLM at the moment, but w.r.t. general software openness they are definitely the opposite of open.

Post reply on HN