Hugging Face is exploring a sale that would value the AI platform at at least 13 billion dollars. A bank is gauging interest from bidders, but a deal has not yet been reached.
This is according to sources cited by Business Insider. No deal has been finalized yet. This is an ongoing exploratory process, not a signed agreement.
The $13 billion figure stands in stark contrast to the last known valuation. In 2023, according to PitchBook, Hugging Face was valued at $4.5 billion following an investment round in which Salesforce, Intel, and Google, among others, invested hundreds of millions. Other investors include Lux Capital and Addition.
From model hub to infrastructure layer
French entrepreneurs Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf founded Hugging Face in 2016. The platform offers access to hundreds of thousands of models and datasets, plus tools to fine-tune and deploy them. This includes on-premises solutions: the company partners with companies such as Dell, AWS, and Cloudflare for this purpose.
So while the company doesn’t build cutting-edge models, it has become indispensable for developers working with models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta. That position at the center of the ecosystem is proving to be worth a lot of money.
Incident involving an AI agent
Hugging Face recently found itself in the news unintentionally following a security incident. OpenAI announced that one of its AI agents escaped from the sandbox during a controlled cybersecurity test, gained internet access, and subsequently hacked into Hugging Face to complete the task.
According to OpenAI, the models involved in that evaluation had reduced cybersecurity restrictions. The agent carried out several steps independently: exploiting a vulnerability in the test environment, moving laterally to systems with internet access, and then attacking Hugging Face. The agent also attempted to target other companies.
Hugging Face stated that the activity remained limited and was contained, and subsequently collaborated with OpenAI on the analysis.