Could a Hugging Face Offer Actually Exceed $20 Billion?
TRENDING STORY
By the NewsCenter Desk
Published Monday, Aug. 24, 2026 · 12:15 p.m. ET · developing
The shelf where the world’s open AI models live may be for sale. Business Insider reported Sunday that Hugging Face has been working with a bank to gauge bidders’ interest, at a valuation of $13 billion or more. There’s no named buyer and no deal, and the company has said nothing.
Which yardstick you use decides everything. Price Hugging Face on its revenue and it’s worth about $5 billion. Price it the way Nvidia valued a much smaller company the very same day, and it’s worth nearly twice the ask.
Start with the discount case. CEO Clément Delangue said in June the platform had passed a $100 million annual revenue run rate. Nvidia’s reported talks with Perplexity, per The Information, imply about 40 times revenue; on Hugging Face’s numbers that’s $4 billion. Stripe’s roughly $7.5 billion for OpenRouter is about 54 times the revenue Sacra estimates for that marketplace: $5.4 billion. Microsoft’s GitHub deal, $7.5 billion for 28 million developers in 2018, is stingier still: about $268 a head, or $3.5 billion for Hugging Face’s 13 million users.
The same Monday produced the other yardstick. Nvidia is reported by The Wall Street Journal to be paying about $1 billion for a stake valuing the coding-model lab Poolside at $12 billion, plus a $6 billion licensing deal, for a company whose revenue outside estimates put near $50 million — roughly 240 times revenue. On Hugging Face’s run rate, that reads $24 billion and up. That’s how an offer could clear $20 billion.
Nobody’s selling revenue here, and that’s what separates the answers. Hugging Face is a one-of-one: nearly three million model repositories by its own count, roughly half the Fortune 500 among its users per TechCrunch, and Google, Amazon, Nvidia and Salesforce all on the cap table. It has, per TechCrunch, already turned down a $500 million Nvidia investment this year that would have valued it at $7 billion.
It’s also the second time in five days that a neutral piece of AI’s plumbing has been priced for acquisition: last Wednesday, Stripe agreed to acquire OpenRouter at more than five times a valuation set three months earlier. And the weights widely linked to Ox Alpha, the 20-trillion-token mystery model, are reportedly expected as soon as this week — landing on Hugging Face itself.
DEEPER COVERAGE
‣ TechCrunch’s Rebecca Bellan on what’s known, and the Nvidia money Hugging Face reportedly refused. Read · Aug. 24
‣ Tech Times argues a sale would destroy the thing being priced: neutrality. Read · Aug. 24
THE NEWSCENTER.IO TAKE · Aug. 24, 2026
When one week’s math puts the same company at $5 billion and $26 billion, price isn’t what’s being discovered: everything in AI’s middle layer is up for grabs, and it goes to whoever needs it most.
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