Nvidia's Reported $12.9 Billion Would Value Hugging Face at Nearly Triple Its 2023 Price.

Nvidia and Hugging Face, the hub where developers post and download open-source AI models, are in talks over a sale of the company. The figure in circulation is $12.9 billion. The Information reported that as an agreed price, TechCrunch reported on August 26, 2026. Business Insider, which first reported the takeover interest, reported the same night that the talks had not produced a signed agreement and could still fall apart, according to TechCrunch.

TechCrunch said it asked Nvidia and Hugging Face for comment and that neither had responded. What is not known is when, or whether, anything gets signed.

The price is the least interesting part. What is being decided is who owns the places where models are stored, rented and run, and everyone who rents computing instead of building it inherits those terms.

$12.9 billion against about $150 million in revenue

Hugging Face was valued at $4.5 billion in 2023, TechCrunch reported. That round raised $235 million, led by Salesforce Ventures, with Alphabet's GV, IBM Ventures and Nvidia among the investors, the outlet reported. The company has been generating about $150 million a year in revenue, per The Information. That is up from roughly $100 million two months earlier, The Information reported. Chief executive Clem Delangue had described the business as “close to profitability” in earlier comments to TechCrunch. A price near $13 billion is also the number reported by PYMNTS.

This is not Nvidia's first offer. Citing earlier Financial Times reporting, TechCrunch said Hugging Face turned down a $500 million Nvidia investment in late 2025. The proposed terms would have valued the company at $7 billion, the outlet reported. Hugging Face did not want a dominant investor able to sway its decisions, per that reporting.

Nvidia's reasoning, as TechCrunch laid it out: OpenAI, Google, Amazon and Anthropic are all building their own AI chips, and a healthy open-source ecosystem keeps more buyers on Nvidia hardware. The Information also reported that owning Hugging Face, which already helps developers run models on rented computing power, would give Nvidia a way back into cloud services after it scaled back its own DGX Cloud business.

Anthropic's sixth infrastructure deal in eight months

Anthropic agreed to rent about $45 billion of computing power over six years from Nscale, a British company, TechCrunch reported. Nscale was founded in 2024, the outlet reported. The capacity runs on Nvidia's Vera Rubin chips, out of a West Virginia data center due to be live by late 2027.

It is the sixth major infrastructure deal Anthropic has struck in eight months, the outlet reported. Earlier ones include a $10 billion arrangement with Volta and a $5 billion one with AMD, plus deals with SpaceX, Amazon and Google. None of that capacity exists yet in the sense that matters to a customer: it is contracted, not running.

Two million more GPUs, and 100,000 for federal work

Amazon Web Services and Nvidia said they will add 2 million GPUs, in Nvidia's own announcement and a matching post from Amazon. The chips span the Blackwell Ultra, Rubin and Rubin Ultra generations. About 100,000 of them are earmarked for secure federal infrastructure, per the companies. Announced now. Delivered, the two companies say, across 2027 and 2028.

Read together, the three items describe one market: a chip maker buying the distribution layer, a model company renting capacity a year before it switches on, and a cloud provider booking hardware two calendar years out. The Hugging Face piece is the only one still reversible, and only because nobody has signed it.

Source: techcrunch.com, retrieved August 27, 2026.