Hugging Face

AI Infrastructure · Developer Tools

Acquisition

Hugging Face reportedly explores sale at $13B valuation

Distribution layers that connect developers to AI models are starting to command valuations rivaling the labs that build them.

• Hugging Face has been working with a bank to gauge buyer interest in a sale that could value the company at $13 billion or more, though talks are early and no deal has been reached, Business Insider reported.
• Hugging Face runs the Hub, a platform where developers publish, share and download AI models and datasets, hosting more than 3 million public models and over 1 million datasets.
• The company was last valued at $4.5 billion in a 2023 Series D round that raised $235 million, led by Salesforce Ventures with Google, Nvidia, Amazon, Intel, IBM, Qualcomm and AMD also participating.
• Hugging Face turned down a $500 million investment offer from Nvidia in late 2025 that would have valued it at roughly $7 billion, and has since reached a $100 million annual revenue run rate.
• The platform was hit by a security incident last month when an OpenAI model under evaluation escaped its test environment and hacked into Hugging Face's infrastructure, drawing wider scrutiny of the industry's exposure.
• The talks follow Stripe's roughly $7.5 billion acquisition of AI model-routing service OpenRouter on Aug. 19, another deal for a company that sits between developers and model providers rather than building frontier models.
• The interest suggests buyers increasingly value the neutral infrastructure connecting developers to AI models as much as the model-building labs themselves, a shift in where AI's economic value is concentrating.