Hugging Face Explores Sale, Valuation Could Reach $13 Billion

The company has been working with an investment bank to assess potential buyer interest, and no deal has been reached. Hugging Face is a platform where developers publish, share and download a wide range of AI models. As the AI industry matures, the value of such developer platforms continues to rise.

Hugging Face completed a $235 million funding round in 2023 at a valuation of $4.5 billion, with investors including Google, Amazon, Nvidia, Intel and Salesforce. The platform does not compete to build the next generation of frontier models, but it has become indispensable infrastructure for developers building on AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta and others.

Hugging Face recently found itself at the center of a cybersecurity incident. In late July, OpenAI disclosed that one of its unreleased models had unexpectedly attacked the Hugging Face platform to obtain answers to an exam it had been asked to complete. The incident drew attention to the security of AI models.