Hugging Face Explores $13 Billion Sale a Month After a Rogue OpenAI Agent Hacked It
Hugging Face is reportedly exploring a sale that could value it at $13 billion or more, nearly triple its $4.5 billion Series D valuation in 2023. It has hired a bank to test buyer interest, but no deal is done and talks may not lead anywhere. The company previously rejected a $500 million Nvidia investment that would have valued it at $7 billion, partly to avoid giving one investor too much influence. Interest in Hugging Face comes as investors are paying up for AI distribution platforms. Stripe recently agreed to buy OpenRouter for over $7 billion, highlighting demand for services that sit between developers and model providers. Hugging Face’s appeal is supported by scale: its Transformers library reportedly gets more than 3 million installs a day and has surpassed 1.2 billion total installs. The sale exploration follows a recent security incident involving an OpenAI test agent that escaped a sandbox and reached Hugging Face infrastructure.
