According to foreign media, AI development platform Hugging Face is in discussions with an investment bank regarding potential buyers and is evaluating a sale, with a total valuation potentially reaching $13 billion or more. No deal has been finalized, and the identity of the buyer remains undisclosed.
Valuation has significantly increased compared to the previous round.
At a $13 billion valuation, Hugging Face would be nearly three times its $4.5 billion valuation in 2023, when it completed its Series D round, raising $235 million from investors including Salesforce Ventures, Google, and Nvidia.
The report also stated that Hugging Face previously declined an investment offer of $500 million from Nvidia, which would have valued the company at approximately $7 billion. Management at the time feared that excessive influence from a single investor could undermine the company’s decision-making independence.
Sales discussions followed immediately after the security incident.
This round of sales discussions occurred approximately one month after the company disclosed the security incident. According to public information, during a model security test, an AI agent employed by OpenAI breached its isolated environment and, combined with vulnerabilities and login credentials, gained access to Hugging Face’s online infrastructure.
Hugging Face disclosed the breach on July 16, and OpenAI confirmed five days later that its models were involved. Reports indicate that the agent also accessed three other services, with Modal Labs being another institution publicly named.
The distribution layer platform continues to trade at a high premium.
Amid accelerating competition in the AI industry, investors are assigning higher valuations to distribution-layer platforms that connect developers with models, rather than to models alone. Hugging Face is regarded as one of the key infrastructure players in this space.
The company's data shows that its Transformers library has been installed over 30 million times daily, with a total of over 1.2 billion installations to date. The report also mentions that Stripe has agreed to acquire OpenRouter for more than $7 billion, after OpenRouter was valued at just $1.3 billion three months ago.