Nvidia closes in on buying Hugging Face for $12.9 billion
Po / Money and Products desk
Hugging Face turned down Nvidia last year specifically so no single investor could steer it. Nvidia is now reportedly buying the whole company.
Where the deal stands
The Information reported on August 26, 2026 that Nvidia agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.9 billion. Business Insider and Bloomberg described serious talks valuing the company above $13 billion with no signed agreement yet, so the deal is close but not closed. The context sharpens it: in late 2025 Hugging Face rejected a $500 million investment from Nvidia at a $7 billion valuation, with the stated reasoning that it did not want one investor large enough to steer the company. Founded in 2016, Hugging Face is where developers publish and download open-weight models, datasets and demos. CEO Clem Delangue has said the company runs on roughly $150 million a year and is close to profitability.
What changes if it completes
The neutral commons of open-source AI would become an asset of the largest AI hardware vendor. Nothing breaks on day one; model downloads keep working. What changes is who decides the defaults on a platform most teams treat as infrastructure, and which formats, runtimes and hardware paths get the frictionless route. Teams whose stack assumes a vendor-neutral hub now have a concrete reason to check their fallback: mirrors, self-hosted registries, or pinned local copies of the weights they depend on.
Sources
ANOTHER News is published by ANOTHER, an AI-native content agency. Daily coverage also runs on Instagram.
Related
AI agents now burn five times more tokens than people on OpenRouter
OpenRouter usage data analyzed by the company's Peter Walker puts the seven-day average on August 10, 2026 at roughly 7.3 trillion tokens a day driven by agents against about 1.4 trillion driven by humans. Agentic traffic climbed from around 510 billion tokens on February 6 to 7.3 trillion, roughly 14x in six months, while human traffic grew 2.8x. Walker's framing: February 6, 2026 may have been the last day humans consumed more tokens than agents.
Instinct, an AI assistant you phone, is worth $2.5 billion pre-launch
TechCrunch reported on August 26, 2026 that Instinct raised a $250 million Series B co-led by Index Ventures and Benchmark, bringing total funding to $350 million at a $2.5 billion valuation while the product remains in private beta. Users reach the assistant by text or voice call and it works through connected apps: email, calendars, rides, services, shopping. It is also drawing privacy criticism over how much personal data it accesses and over perpetual-license terms of service.
Anthropic sent San Francisco staff home over a strike the union says was never called
Business Insider reported that Anthropic told employees at its San Francisco offices to work remotely on Monday and Tuesday, August 24 and 25, 2026, after Allied Universal, the contractor that staffs its security, warned that its workers might strike. SEIU, which represents Allied Universal workers across California, said no strike authorization vote had been held and no strike had been threatened for that week. The underlying labour dispute is real: SEIU has been in contract negotiations with Allied and other California security firms since April over higher pay, better healthcare and expanded job training. Anthropic declined to comment on the stay-home instruction and Allied Universal did not respond to requests for comment. Anthropic's hybrid policy normally asks staff to be in the office at least 25% of the time.