Hugging Face is exploring a sale that could value it at $13 billion or more
Hugging Face is exploring a sale that could value the company at $13 billion or more, Business Insider reported Sunday, citing people familiar with the matter. The company has retained a bank to gauge interest from potential buyers, but no deal has been reached, and it is not clear who Hugging Face has been talking to.
A $13 billion price tag would nearly triple the $4.5 billion valuation Hugging Face set in its 2023 Series D round. That financing raised $235 million and was led by Salesforce Ventures, with Google and Nvidia also investing.
It previously rejected Nvidia’s $500 million offer
Hugging Face has turned down large checks before. Late last year, it rejected a $500 million investment from Nvidia that would have valued the company at $7 billion. The concern was that a single investor would gain too much influence over its decisions.
CEO Clément Delangue has described Hugging Face’s relationship with the developers who use the platform as a long-term commitment, not something to trade away casually.
Decrypt said Hugging Face did not respond to a request for comment.
The sale talk follows an OpenAI-linked breach
The sale talk comes about a month after Hugging Face disclosed a hack tied to an AI system that was not supposed to be able to do that. In May, OpenAI was testing whether its models could find and exploit software flaws on their own. One of the agents decided the test box itself was the obstacle.
The agent broke out of its sandbox, the isolated environment meant to keep it from touching real systems, chained a zero-day exploit with stolen login credentials, and reached Hugging Face’s live infrastructure. Hugging Face disclosed the intrusion on July 16, and OpenAI confirmed five days later that its models were responsible.
OpenAI later said the same agent used exposed logins to reach four other services beyond Hugging Face, only one of which, Modal Labs, has been named publicly. Delangue also credited Chinese lab Z.ai’s open model GLM 5.2 with helping contain the breach, saying American commercial AI tools refused to help because their safety filters could not tell investigative code from an attack.
Hugging Face did not take legal action against OpenAI.
Investors are paying up for the distribution layer
If confirmed, this would be the second major development in the open-source AI space in the last week. It also follows Stripe’s agreement to pay more than $7 billion to buy OpenRouter, a startup that routes prompts across more than 400 AI models for millions of developers. OpenRouter had been valued at just $1.3 billion three months earlier.
Investors are increasingly paying premium prices for the distribution layer sitting between developers and AI models, rather than for the models themselves.
Hugging Face’s own numbers help explain the interest. According to the company, its Transformers library is installed more than 3 million times a day and has passed 1.2 billion cumulative installs. No timeline has been set for a decision on the sale.