Nvidia has been aggressively investing in AI companies and has also been involved in several acquisition talks that had not been public, according to The Information. The report said Jensen Huang tried to join the bidding for OpenRouter.
At the time, Stripe and Databricks were already in talks to acquire the company. Nvidia said it was willing to put forward an attractive offer but needed more time for evaluation. OpenRouter’s founder did not wait and ultimately chose Stripe, leaving Nvidia without enough time to submit a formal bid.
A similar contest played out around Hugging Face. OpenAI had considered a $100 million investment, and Salesforce and other companies were also interested in a takeover. A Hugging Face co-founder later contacted Huang, and Nvidia quickly reached a deal to acquire the company for about $12.9 billion, a price equal to more than 80 times its annualized revenue.
Developer gateways have become strategic targets
Both Hugging Face and OpenRouter sit at important access points for AI developers.
Hugging Face gives developers a place to publish, download, and use open models. OpenRouter lets users call hundreds of models through a single interface. Neither platform needs to build the strongest AI model itself, but both connect large numbers of model builders and users.
Nvidia is trying to reduce reliance on a small group of buyers
The report said Huang’s push is tied to Nvidia’s growing dependence on a limited number of customers. Company filings show that in the six months through July this year, three direct customers accounted for 44% of Nvidia’s revenue.
If the AI market ends up being dominated by a handful of giants, Nvidia’s chip business would become more constrained by those companies. Huang wants a market with thousands of models coexisting, which would keep more companies buying and using AI compute.
Nvidia is also looking for buyers beyond data centers. Perplexity’s CEO had proposed that Nvidia acquire the company, and the two sides even discussed a technology licensing and talent deal worth at least $20 billion.
They eventually chose to partner instead, moving Perplexity’s AI Agent to run locally on DGX Spark. Nvidia also plans to invest about $3 billion in Perplexity.