Hugging Face has crossed over $150 million in annualized recurring revenue (ARR), experiencing a massive 50% growth surge over just a two-month span.
Does anyone else see the irony here?
12 replies (most recent on top)
If this acquisition gives open source AI "more resources, more scale, more visibility," can Anthropic and OpenAI survive?
Don't they have the same problem as SAS?
SAS had decades to lock in customers before open source competition arrived. Today SAS still has a large, if declining, business.
Anthropic and OpenAI don't have decades. Their customers aren't locked in.
And yet they are IPO'ing, while SAS is not.
https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/09/03/hugging-face-is-too-important-to-fall-into-nvidias-hands/5294363
As antitrust magnets go, Nvidia buying Hugging Face takes the cake. You wouldn't let an automaker acquire the primary means of fuel distribution. Nor would you let it buy the primary means by which the mechanics are trained. Yet, Nvidia's acquisition of Hugging Face is tantamount to both.
But norms, rules, regulations, laws, and morals no longer apply so have at the bloody feeding frenzy while the water is warm and the prey is splashing.
If only there were some government entity that could question possibly non-competitive actions and, dare I say, prevent them or maybe set conditions on them.
The deal has been approved, for $12.9B. Several sources report that the sale was triggered by the OpenAI hack in July:
"During the summer, I think we realized that Hugging Face and open source AI in general was at the turning point, and that it needed more resources, more scale, more visibility..."
https://www.techtimes.com/articles/326450/20260903/nvidia-buys-hugging-face-1293b-openai-hack-prompted-ceo-sell.htm
Looks like someone's back to deleting posted comments again!
Eventually the incestuous circular financing being perpetrated by the mag7 will come back to bite them. Who knows when "eventually" is, but right now creating your own models is not profitable. The math for NVDA/anthropic/openai/goog/orcl/amzn/msft just doesn't work. They're cash incinerators ATM and the delusional "runway" being touted for AI revenue growth STILL won't pay back the investments.
Moreover, once these companies start charging cost + margin for these models, that revenue will collapse. The broader market is not going to pay $400/mo for claude pro, or $13K/mo for the max plan.
I don't see how this pertains to SAS's business in any way, or is some sort of indictment of the company.
There's so much to criticize the leadership team over, this isn't it.
Moral of the story is the perception of value given the critical mass AI has reached and the accelerated potential cost of not capturing this opportunity. Otherwise, the multiple of revenue being floated for acquisition is insane.
What's even sadder is that HF is younger as a company than Viya is as a SAS architecture. This missed decade of opportunity pretty well predicts SAS' future if radical change doesn't happen immediately.
AI is devious and unethical. How terrifying!
Watch this! https://www.youtube.com/shorts/WXm7Rf1bR2M
@br True. It could be built for much less than $13B.
Nvidia has plenty of cash, and must think it better to buy than to build, to acquire HuggingFace users quickly.
Why not just have AI create a new website, like HuggingMask, given software is a lowly commodity now? Surely, if nVidia builds it, someone will come.
For that price, they could buy SAS.
Should be no worse than Microsoft buying Github.