Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B

Interesting that Hugging Face turned down a $500M investment from Nvidia less than a year ago (at a $7B valuation) because they "didn't want a dominant investor that could sway its decisions"

https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/26/nvidia-closes-in-on-huggin...

Ten months later they're selling the entire company to Nvidia for $12.9B. So much for not wanting a dominant investor ...

I pull weights from HF most weeks (Ollama, ComfyUI etc) and I suspect Nvidia aren't paying 86x revenue for a file host. They're paying for the fact that every README, notebook and workflow on the planet has a hardcoded huggingface.co path in it. It's the npm/PyPI of AI, and now the company that sells the GPUs also owns the registry that decides which models are easy to find and download

I don't think Nvidia will start deleting models. They don't need to. They just need to make sure the models that run best on CUDA get promoted, and the ones that run well on a Mac or an AMD card (or the "abliterated" finetunes) quietly get less visibility. Nvidia have plenty of form for this kind of segmentation (e.g. removing NVLink from consumer cards after the 3090).

The only alternative registry with any real scale is ModelScope, which is owned by Alibaba. So the choice for anyone worried about this is an American GPU monopoly or the Chinese Communist Party. Anyone know of a serious third option?

> Some people say it's a loss for EU sovereign AI but HF is technically an American corporation

Three French founders set up the company in New York, raised their money from American investors (Salesforce, GV, IBM, Nvidia) and are now selling to an American chip company for $12.9B.

Europe's most successful AI company was only ever European in the nationality of its founders.

> the founders (Julien, Thomas and Clem - all French) stem to make significant amount of money, which they are likely to pour into a new frontier AI lab in Europe

Why would they do that? They already moved to America once to build a company. Since then the EU has passed the AI Act (obligations on general purpose model providers in force since August 2025), so the incentive to build the next one in Europe is weaker than it was in 2016, not stronger.

Ambitious Europeans have been voting with their feet for decades. The EU could fix this any time it liked by getting out of the way of its own entrepreneurs, but it prefers to write more regulation and then complain about "sovereignty" when the businesses it drove away get bought.

That is fair point, but still you can build such system for under a grand and then pimp yourself out to VCs.

> Some people say it's a loss for EU sovereign AI but HF is technically an American corporation.

The company was founded in NYC. Anyone saying that is really a clown.

There's no EU sovereign AI. My EU is absolutely nowhere when it comes to AI or tech. No NVidia, no Google, no Meta (I hate Meta but it's a big company), no StarLink, no Alibaba, no Tencent.

No nothing. The biggest EU software company is SAP for f--k's sake.

SAP.

Let that sink in: the biggest EU software company is ranked 65th biggest company in the world. There's, thankfully, ASML but that's it.

> ... which they are likely to pour into a new frontier AI lab in Europe. So potentially it's a big win.

Wishful thinking. I don't buy it for a second that it's going to be a "big win".

And France is a country that hates its rich with a passion: they'll now be seen as demons, not just for having sold to the US... But simply for being very rich.

People have no idea at which point we in the EU are totally screwed.

Why would these guys come back to France only to see their wealth confiscated? I certainly wouldn't. Screw the EU.

You have merely described vertical integration and something that isn't vertical integration and claimed they are the same thing.