Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sometimes I wonder if anybody on this website has ever actually done professional software engineering at scale. What a ridiculous take.
It isn't an awful 'surface level take'. I'm not that familiar either, and so had same question. I thought they just hosted other peoples models. So why the value of 13B?
More than anything, they are buying a position within the ecosystem. Many of us could get a version of an app deployed in short order that implements most core HF functionality, but I am sorry to say that this is very far from the "hard part" of building a business, and this was the case even before coding agents were a thing. It's no small thing to become the first tool pretty much everyone reaches for in a particular niche, and therefore the incumbent in that niche
And there's lots of inertia keeping companies and developers on these incumbents like HF and GitHub -- see also Microsoft's play here dumping billions into a company that is basically peanuts and probably nowhere near as profitable as Microsoft normally would like. But they bought it at a time when they were trying to make Microsoft synonymous with open source, and it was a great play to that end. Likewise Nvidia wants to be synonymous with AI. Even if HF is a loss leader, the positioning is probably worth it
To a lesser degree, Nvidia probably also might like to reinvigorate its flagging cloud compute business and this could be a natural way to do that. At least TechCrunch thinks this, but I, an overconfident layperson, feel that the positioning is where most of the value is for Nvidia, and consolidating that will act as a force multiplier for that + anything else they may want to do with this space