Report: AI model hub Hugging Face exploring sale at $13B valuation

Hugging Face Inc. is exploring a sale that could value the artificial intelligence model repository at $13 billion or more, Business Insider reported today.

The company has brought in a bank to sound out potential buyers, according to the report, which cited people familiar with the process. Talks are early and no bidder was named in the report.

Hugging Face last brought in outside money three years ago when it raised a $235 million round at a valuation of $4.5 billion, led by Salesforce Ventures. Nvidia Corp. was among the backers. Google LLC, Amazon.com Inc., Intel Corp., Qualcomm Inc. and IBM Corp. also took part. Sequoia Capital and Lux Capital were earlier investors.

Chief Executive Clement Delangue, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf started the company in New York in 2016. The first product was a chatbot. The company now runs the Hub, where developers publish, download and fine-tune open models. More than 3 million public models sit on the platform. Datasets number more than 1 million. Revenue comes from paid subscription tiers, enterprise hosting and compute, and the company has never disclosed a figure.

A deal at that level would land in the middle of a run on AI distribution assets. Stripe Inc. agreed on Aug. 19 to acquire model routing service OpenRouter in a deal reported at $7.5 billion. Both companies sit between developers and the model providers rather than building frontier models themselves.