TechCrunch published at 23:32 PDT on 26 August — 06:32 UTC on the 27th — that Nvidia is closing in on an acquisition of Hugging Face at $12.9bn, citing reporting by The Information from Wednesday night. Business Insider had reported takeover interest over the preceding weekend. Two things about this story are worth separating from the headline.
The price moved down
The figure circulating at the weekend was "more than $13bn." The figure now attached to the talks is $12.9bn. Acquisition rumours conventionally escalate as bidding is reported; this one has drifted slightly lower. That is not evidence of anything on its own, but it is the opposite of the pattern that usually accompanies a deal converging, and it is worth noting because the same coverage treats the two numbers as interchangeable confirmations of each other. They are not: one is a weekend report of interest, the other a mid-week report of a price.
What the common framing gets wrong
Headlines are running "Nvidia to buy Hugging Face" and "Nvidia agrees $12.9bn deal." The underlying reporting says neither. It says the talks "had not yet produced a signed agreement and could still atomize." TechCrunch states it approached both companies and neither responded. There is no press release, no regulatory filing and no on-the-record comment from either side. The distance between "reported to be in advanced talks at a price" and "agreed to acquire" is the entire distance between a rumour and a transaction, and it is being collapsed in the retelling of a story about a company whose own reported revenue is public.
The multiple
Hugging Face's annual revenue is put at roughly $150m, up from about $100m two months earlier. At $12.9bn, that is a multiple of approximately 86 times sales. The company's last established valuation was $4.5bn, set in 2023 on a $235m round. The reported price is therefore close to three times the last priced valuation. The same reporting notes an earlier Nvidia approach at $500m on a $7bn valuation, which Hugging Face rejected.
Why Nvidia would pay it
Hugging Face is where open model weights are distributed and where a large share of the world's model downloads are counted. Owning that distribution point would give Nvidia a position at the layer above silicon, at a moment when several of its largest customers are designing accelerators of their own. Whether that strategic logic justifies 86 times revenue is a question the market will get to ask only if a deal is actually signed — and as of this reporting, one has not been.