Two accounts of the same deal disagree on whether Nvidia has actually signed an agreement or is still negotiating one. Neither Nvidia nor Hugging Face has confirmed either version.
Nvidia is reportedly in talks to acquire Hugging Face, the AI startup behind the leading hub for open-source models and datasets, at a valuation above $13 billion, in discussions described as not yet producing a signed agreement. A separate report the same night said the two companies had already agreed to a $12.9 billion deal. Neither Nvidia nor Hugging Face has confirmed a transaction, and no regulatory filing or company statement addresses either account.
The reports landed hours after Nvidia posted second-quarter revenue of $96.2 billion, comfortably above the roughly $92 billion Wall Street had modeled, with guidance calling for about $108 billion in the current quarter. That earnings beat, not the Hugging Face report, is driving Nvidia's stock. Shares closed Wednesday's regular session at $209.66, down 1.59%, then climbed from an intraday low near $203.69 to roughly $219.54 by 8 p.m. Eastern, entirely within the post-earnings window and before the Hugging Face story existed. Premarket trading Thursday put shares between $221.83 and $226.81, a move of 6% to 7% generally attributed to Nvidia's own guidance rather than the acquisition report. A roughly four-hour overnight stretch lacks clean intraday data, leaving unresolved whether any small piece of that move reflects the Hugging Face story.
If both reported figures hold, a $12.9 billion price against Hugging Face's own $150 million in annualized revenue implies a multiple near 86 times revenue. Nvidia walked away from a $500 million investment that would have valued Hugging Face at $7 billion less than a year ago; a 2023 funding round had valued the company at $4.5 billion. Against Nvidia's own $96.2 billion in quarterly revenue, a $12.9 billion transaction would not move the company's balance sheet in any way a shareholder would notice.
The strategic logic, if the deal is real, is straightforward. Owning Hugging Face would extend Nvidia's reach from the compute layer into software distribution, a pattern consistent with its 2019 purchase of networking company Mellanox for $6.9 billion, still its largest completed deal, and its roughly $700 million acquisition of orchestration startup Run:ai. It would not be Nvidia's largest transaction outright; that distinction belongs to its roughly $40 billion bid for chip designer Arm, abandoned in 2022 after antitrust opposition in the U.S., U.K. and European Union, a precedent that makes regulatory scrutiny a real risk if this deal is confirmed.
None of that resolves the more basic question: whether an agreement exists at all. One account describes an unfinished negotiation. The other describes a completed one. Until Nvidia or Hugging Face confirms which is accurate, or denies both, the price, the multiple and the strategic rationale rest on the same unconfirmed foundation.