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Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B

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

#221

The more interesting is HF turned down a $500M Nvidia investment late last year at a $7B valuation, after passing on a $235M round in 2023 at $4.5B — going from "we don't want a dominant investor" to a $13B full acquisition in under a year is quite the reversal.

Seems the opposite of a reversal to me.

Reversal would be "valued at 7B then valued at nothing", this is more like "nah, we want more" then "nah, we want more" then "yes, that's what we want :)".

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

#222

The more interesting is HF turned down a $500M Nvidia investment late last year at a $7B valuation, after passing on a $235M round in 2023 at $4.5B — going from "we don't want a dominant investor" to a $13B full acquisition in under a year is quite the reversal.

I don't think they passed on the 4.5 billion. They still raised it in 2023 with investors like Alphabet etc. They turned Nvidia *earlier this year* for the $7 billion valuation deal. It makes sense if they were angling for an acquisition.

This is the article you are referring to is this but your facts are wrong: https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/24/hugging-face-reportedly-in...

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

#223
post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nvidia has hardly open sourced the nvcc compiler, yet no-one here is complaining about why it is closed source. Modular on the other hand creates the Mojo compiler gets criticised for not open sourcing it immediately and now once they do, no-one cares anymore. Huggingface was not just a target for open source, but as a force to have open weight models run better on Nvidia against the rest.

I assume it's because nvidia is a hardware company that produces world class hardware, and it's a compiler to target that. Whereas mojo is a general purpose language, and we're absolutely spoiled for choice on modern languages with open source compilers. I'm not saying it's fair or right, I still think mojo is neat, but isn't exactly comparing apples to apples.

We can stop with these weak excuses since AMD and Intel have done more for open source than Nvidia has, including their GPU drivers for Linux.

Nvidia on the other hand has not and the best they have done is a bunch of closed-source blobs which they do more closed source releases than the rest.

Mojo is open source and targets all GPU architectures for their compiler regardless of the vendor and nvcc targets their own (and both that and CUDA are closed source).

So this is directly an apples to apples comparison.

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

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linus isn't wrong but at the same time NV has shipped more compute than AMD and Intel combined to consumers. The kind of performance I get out of a modest outlay never ceases to amaze me.

Sales volume has no correlation with how good a company is for an ecosystem. See Microsoft, Adobe, Apple, Sony, and so on.

NV is a very different beast from all of those. I have yet to regret buying any of their products and I wouldn't touch your list with a stolen 10' pole.

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

#225
post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nvidia has hardly open sourced the nvcc compiler, yet no-one here is complaining about why it is closed source. Modular on the other hand creates the Mojo compiler gets criticised for not open sourcing it immediately and now once they do, no-one cares anymore. Huggingface was not just a target for open source, but as a force to have open weight models run better on Nvidia against the rest.

> no-one cares anymore. possibly because it took qualcomm buying them to make that happen.

Just say you don't know.

Mojo was partially open source before Qualcomm bought them, and they were going to do open source it anyway.

Was NVCC or CUDA ever open source since the lifetime of its development?

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

#226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you just quote an LLM as a citation? That's not how citations work.

"That's not how citations work." (Dude on the interwebz, 2026) But more seriously, this is my first time seeing that as well, and I'm not sure I like it. Citing an LLM is a little like citing Wikipedia to me, you cite the primary source the LLM is quoting directly, not the secondary source.

A Wikipedia link can be nice when you get several different sources provided.

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

#227
post #16

The companies have aligned incentives so I don't think this is a terrible acquisition for customers.

Vertically integrated monopolies naturally have aligned in incentives for themselves, which allows more capture which turns out bad for customers. Whether it is a monopoly is an open question.

This isn't vertical integration. This is a commoditize your complements play and that does benefit customers. Nvidia benefits from supporting the open model ecosystem, if models are a commodity the gpus become what's scarce.

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

#228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> NVIDIA is one of the most open labs. Of course they are. They're commoditizing their complement. I want to own the hardware, not play around in an nvidia fiefdom full of nvidia rules.

nothing stopping you from doing that

Are you joking? They just bought HF for $13bill and didn’t break a sweat. They are dominant and spreading.

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

#229
post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no-one cares anymore. possibly because it took qualcomm buying them to make that happen.

Just say you don't know. Mojo was partially open source before Qualcomm bought them, and they were going to do open source it anyway. Was NVCC or CUDA ever open source since the lifetime of its development?

> they were going to do open source it anyway.

uh huh.

> Was NVCC or CUDA ever open source since the lifetime of its development?

you ever ask Nvidia why? i did.

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

#230
post #37
post #14

Anyone old enough to remember anti trust laws or even just laws?

Please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News. No doubt you have the nucleus of a substantive comment here, but that's not enough. If you only post the shallowest top stratum of what you're thinking, other people do the same, and then we get "Laws are for poor people" and endless descending repetition. The whole point of this site is to try for something other than that. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsgui…

You are right but its the initial shock on bad news, hopefully this will spawn alternative competing services.
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