Being neutral is easier without a price tag

Nvidia has reportedly agreed to buy Hugging Face for 12.9 billion dollars, according to The Information. Other reports put the talks above 13 billion, with no deal signed yet. Neither company has confirmed it.

What catches me isn’t the price, it’s the buyer. End of 2025, Hugging Face turned down a 500 million dollar investment from Nvidia at a 7 billion dollar valuation. The reason: taking money from the industry’s dominant GPU maker could tilt a platform meant to stay neutral toward every chipmaker. Less than a year later, Nvidia is reportedly trying to buy the whole company for almost double that valuation.

AMD, AWS and Google all have models and infrastructure on Hugging Face today, competing hardware and cloud ecosystems sitting side by side, which is part of what makes the platform valuable. An acquisition wouldn’t automatically end that. But it would change who gets to decide what neutral means.