It's the first time in the history of the world.
It's been a while since Silicon Valley has had some surprising news.
Invidia has agreed to acquire Hugging Face, the world's largest open-source community, for $12.9 billion.
Earlier, it was reported in the media that Huang had been discussing the acquisition of Hugging Face, valued at more than $13 billion.
Previously, the negotiations of this century were held in high secrecy.
According to sources, the two sides have fought a fierce tug-of-war over the acquisition in recent weeks. Even before a final agreement can be reached, negotiations could break down at any time.
In the end, however, the ability to make money out of it won everything. In the end, the company raised $12.9 billion, directly cutting off all tech giants!
Following the news, the reaction on X rapidly diversified.
Some people think the $13 billion is reasonable or even low, while others' first reaction is concern: If a big company acquires Hugging Face, will the open-source ecosystem be adapted?
What's more, they wrote directly: "They want to shut down open source".
When Hugging Face completed its $235 million financing in 2023, it was joined by Invisalign, whose valuation remained at $4.5 billion.
In less than three years, the value has nearly tripled!
The unusual thing is that the company hasn't trained any of the major front-end models.
How can it sell for $12.9 billion?
If you walk into their offices in 2016, you're definitely not linking them to "$12.9 billion".
Hugging Face was founded in 2016 by French entrepreneurs Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf.
The three-person team, which was founded in New York at the time, originally dreamed of creating a fun chatbot for teenagers.
From left to right: Julian Chaumond, Thomas Wolf, Clément Delangue
The turning point came after 2018: TeamA major decision has been made: open source your own Transformers library.
Since then, Hugging Face has become a global hub for AI models.
As of spring 2026, the platform has hosted more than 2 million open models and 500,000 datasets, with more than 13 million registered users.
All the major open source model companies have published models on it, and more than 30% of the Fortune 500 have opened certified accounts.
It is often referred to in the industry as the "GitHub of AI": GitHub hosting code, Hugging Face hosting model.
They are the gateway to the world of the future.
You think Hugging Face just wants to be quietly a model hosting site?
Wrong, over the past year-and-a-half, its expansion has gone far beyond the four words "touch-like hosting", reaching almost every corner of the AI industry chain.
In February 2026, a shocking open source round of recruitment took place: Georgi Gerganov, founder of llama.cpp, joined Hugging Face with the GGML team.
llama.cpp is currently the world's mainstream local big model reasoning engine. Without it, countless developers could not run big models on consumer-grade graphics cards and Macs.
The trick is deadly: Open source AI, one of the most critical infrastructure for logic locally, is now powered by Hugging Face.
Not only that, they're also selling hardware!
In April 2025, they acquired the French open-source robot company Pollen Robotics and began selling robots.
The product line extends from the $70,000 industrial humanoid robot Reachy 2 to the $100 3D printing mechanical arm SO-101.
Reachy 2
SO-101
In May 2026, the team launched another $2,500 open-source humanoid robot, LeRobot Humanoid.
Just two months later, in July, the shadow of Ingrid appeared: Ingrid integrated its own Isaac GR00T 1.7 and Isaac Teleop into the LeRobot platform.
This has directly led to three million robot developers at Ingrid and 16 million AI developers at Hugging Face winning in the same open-source workflow.
In addition to previous acquisitions of Gradio (Machine Learning Demonstration Tools) and XetHub (Big File Version Control), Hugging Face has completed five acquisitions.
According to multiple estimates, its annual recurring revenue (ARR) has soared to $150 million, up from just about $100 million a few months ago.
This means that the purchase price paid by INVEDA is up to 80 times its long-term earnings.
What is $13 billion worth of sales?We can use the acquisition of GitHub by Microsoft as a reference.
At the time, with 28 million developers and 85 million code repositories, GitHub was the world's largest code-hosting platform.
It was last valued at $2 billion in 2015 and never made a profit, earning about $300 million a year.
Microsoft was valued at $7.5 billion. The market felt like Microsoft was crazy at the time, but it turned out later that Microsoft bought the only way to open the entire software!
It's because of the GitHub community of developers that Microsoft's Copilot has access to amazing natural distribution channels.
Hugging Face is going down the same path, with only the symbols switching from code to AI models.
The $13 billion corresponds to about 130 times ARR, a premium multiple of that of GitHub in the same year, but the buyer accounts for it.Yes, it is.Where developers look for models, ecologyThe Walled RiverThat's where.
Not only Hugging Face, Stripe has just acquired OpenRouter for about $8 billion, and capital is pouring into the distribution and routing layer of AI infrastructure.
Why Ingrid?According to sources, there has always been a shortage of potential buyers for Hugging Face.
Hugging Face's investors include Lux Capital, Addition and Salesforce Ventures, as well as giants such as Google, Amazon, and Great Britain.
More importantly, Ingrid is too rich and too eager to control the ecosystem.
We started with the GPU, then the shelf, then the financing, and now it's time for the Hugging Face.
At this point, Huang Rinpoche is collecting AI supply chains just like he collects a baby dream.
In addition to its $47.9 billion in private equity investments, INVEDA has pledged $18 billion in equity investments for the remainder of the fiscal year.
Now, having the Hugging Face platform can not only give Invidia a foothold among tens of millions of developers, but also bring more computing loads to its home GPU.
Now, Ingrid has repaired a world-wide highway to AI that not only charges for the road, but also stipulates that only cars with Ingrid's license plate can run on the road!
In addition to ecology, security is also a variable that the giants consider.
In July, OpenAI's smart body escaped into a vicious circle, and Hugging Face successfully defended itself against the hack.
For a hosting platform, to cope with this security crisis is to make itself more valuable in valuation negotiations.
Invisalign, holding the core assetsMore importantly, the transaction will allow United to gain control of a core asset in the open-source chase after closed-source competition.
Invidia's senior leadership believes that a large number of thriving open-source models will become a "balance sheet" against closed-source, helping to maintain their dominance.
After all, both OpenAI and Anthropic are developing their own chips.
From another point of view, buying Hugging Face is also "resurrecting" the cloud business of Ingrid.
A year ago, the DGX Cloud business put Invidia on the brink of competing with Amazon's AWS.
Previously, Invisalign promised to spend $13 billion to "reverse-lease" computing from large cloud providers such as AWS and lease it back to app developers.
INVEDA was optimistic that it would one day generate $15 billion in revenue.
Now, Hugging Face is perfectly "backed up" and the extra computing power can be used to support Hugging Face customers.
Hugging Face, are you still neutral?However, what seems to be a perfect marriage is full of dangers.
Other giants have been working on the fat meat for a long time. Microsoft has also discussed the acquisition with Hugging Face senior executives, but has not made substantial progress.
Hugging Face was initially rejected by Ingrid.
As previously reported by the Financial Times, Hugging Face harshly rejected a US$500 million investment proposal at the end of last year (which was valued at US$7 billion).
At the time, Hugging Face's senior executives made it clear that they did not want to introduce a dominant investor who could influence the company's decision-making.
Because this involves the biggest paradox in the $12.9 billion valuation: neutrality.
Hugging Face has become the "GitHub of AI", based on its peer-to-peer view of all underlying hardware.
It not only supports Invidia but also strongly supports AMD and Intel.
As of May this year, the 100 most commonly used hardware configurations for AI developers on Hugging Face
Now, the acquisition of all of Ingrid's shares will undoubtedly embarrass Hugging Face, the biggest neutral asset.
The value of Hugging Face is 100% built on the fragile trust of open source community developers.
Now, this trust may be shaken.
While Ingrid spent $12.9 billion to buy the most important distribution layer in the AI era, the value of the distribution layer will always depend on whether the developers are willing to stay here.
In that year, GitHub successfully overcame a crisis of trust based on its commitment to neutrality.
This time, is Hugging Face going to be flat?