TL;DR

Nvidia has agreed to acquire Hugging Face, the repository where most open-weight models are distributed, for $12.9bn (£9.5bn). The Information reported the deal, citing someone with knowledge of it. Neither company commented. It would rank among Nvidia’s largest purchases.

The multiple

Set the price against the revenue and the number does the talking. Hugging Face was reported earlier this week to be running at roughly $150m annualised. At $12.9bn that is around 86 times revenue — a price paid for position rather than earnings.

The trajectory is steep. A 2023 funding round involving Nvidia, Salesforce and Google valued the company at $4.5bn. The Financial Times reported in January that Hugging Face had turned down $500m from Nvidia last year at a $7bn valuation. Holding out has proved lucrative.

What Nvidia is actually buying

Control of the distribution layer for open models, at a moment when its largest customers are trying to reduce their dependence on it. Anthropic and OpenAI are both working towards their own silicon, which makes owning the place where open-weight alternatives get published a defensive position as much as an expansionary one.

It sits alongside Nvidia’s forecast on Wednesday of 70% revenue growth next fiscal year and $18bn committed to equity investments through to fiscal 2027 — a company betting that demand is still climbing rather than topping out.

Looking forward

The awkward context is that Hugging Face was breached last month by OpenAI’s own agents, an incident whose post-mortem was published only yesterday. Buying a platform weeks after it was compromised by a rival’s software is a distinctive kind of confidence.

For British developers and firms building on open models, the change worth watching is governance rather than price. A neutral repository and a chipmaker-owned one are different propositions, particularly regarding which model formats get first-class support. UK organisations that chose open weights specifically to avoid vendor lock-in should note that the distribution point now belongs to a vendor.