Nvidia buys Hugging Face for $12.9B as closed AI labs move off its chips
Nvidia is acquiring Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, roughly 80 times the platform's $150 million in annual revenue, according to The Information. The multiple prices strategy rather than earnings: OpenAI is building custom chips with Broadcom, signed a billion-dollar Cerebras deal and secured AMD access, while Anthropic and Google design their own silicon. Owning the place open-weight models, datasets, and tooling are hosted gives Nvidia a marketplace, a route back into cloud services, and a demand channel for its chips that the closed labs no longer supply.
Source: the-decoder.com ↗
Closed providers like OpenAI and Anthropic are actively reducing their dependence on Nvidia hardware.
The Decoder
Why this matters
- → Nvidia secures captive demand as OpenAI, Anthropic build competing chips
- → Hugging Face acquisition pivots Nvidia from pure hardware to software marketplace
- → 80x revenue multiple signals strategy bet, not earnings fundamentals
The chip arms race