Hugging Face in Acquisition Talks at $13 Billion or More
Hugging Face has been approached by unnamed buyers at a valuation of $13 billion or more, more than triple the $4.5 billion it was worth at its last funding round in 2023.
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Hugging Face has been approached by unnamed buyers at a valuation of $13 billion or more, according to a TechCrunch report citing Business Insider, which broke the story over the weekend. No deal has been reached, but the startup is reportedly working with banks to help evaluate bids.
- Acquisition talks are underway at a valuation of $13B or more, with Hugging Face reportedly engaging banks to evaluate bids
- The company last raised at a $4.5B valuation in 2023 and earlier this year turned down a $500M Nvidia investment that would have valued it at $7B
- CEO Clem Delangue has publicly stressed long-term responsibility to the open-source community, casting doubt on how serious any sale discussions are
The figure represents a dramatic step up from Hugging Face’s last known valuation. In 2023 the company raised a round led by Salesforce Ventures - with participation from Alphabet, GV, IBM Ventures, and others - at a $4.5 billion post-money valuation. Earlier this year it turned down a $500 million investment from Nvidia that would have valued it at $7 billion, citing a desire to avoid any single dominant investor shaping its decisions.
The talks arrive as appetite for core AI infrastructure companies has surged. Stripe’s $7 billion acquisition of OpenRouter stands as a recent marker of how much strategic buyers are willing to pay for platforms that sit at the centre of AI development workflows.
CEO Clem Delangue’s recent public comments sit in some tension with a potential sale. On a TechCrunch Equity podcast episode he said the company was “close to profitability” and had only “recently started to touch the money that [it] raised three years ago.” He added that Hugging Face is focused on “long-term sustainability of the company rather than short-term profits or fundraising maximization.”
“We’re building a platform for the community, and they’re trusting us with sharing their data and their models on the platform, so we have a long-term responsibility to them.”- Clem Delangue, CEO, Hugging Face
Those statements leave open the question of whether the company is seriously considering a sale or simply fielding unsolicited offers for what has become a central pillar of open-source AI infrastructure.
Practitioner takeaway: Developers and teams that host models, datasets, or production inference on Hugging Face should monitor this closely. A sale to a single large acquirer - particularly one with competing platform interests - could affect pricing, access policies, or the openness of the community hub. Delangue’s stated reluctance to let any dominant investor “sway decisions” is worth keeping in mind: if that principle held against a $500 million Nvidia cheque, it may also constrain any buyer willing to pay $13 billion or more.
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